Displacing Homophobia; 
 
 Gay Male Perspectives in Literature 
 and Culture 
 
 Edited by RorsaSd R. Butters, John H. Cluni, 
 and Hkhaei f'^oon 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2020 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/displacinghomoph01unse 
 

Displacing Homophobia: 
 
 Gay Male Perspectives in Literature 
 and Culture 
 
Displacing Homophobia: 
 
 Gay Male Perspectives in Literature 
 and Culture 
 
 Edited by Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, 
 and Michael Moon 
 
 Duke University Press Durham and London 
 
The text of this book was originally published, 
 in slightly different form and without the 
 present index, as Volume 88, Number i of 
 the South Atlantic Quarterly. 
 
 Copyright © 1989 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 on acid-free paper 
 Library of Congress 
 Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 appear on the last printed page. 
 
Contents 
 
 Foreword i 
 RONALD R. BUTTERS 
 
 Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the English 
 Stage Take Boys for Women? 7 
 
 STEPHEN ORGEL 
 
 The Familialism of “Man” in American 
 Television Melodrama 31 
 
 JOHN R. LEO 
 
 Across Gender, Across Sexuality: 
 
 Willa Gather and Others 53 
 
 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK 
 
 Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell’s 
 Alexandria Quartet 73 
 
 JOSEPH A. BOONE 
 
 Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser’s Familiar 
 Letters 107 
 
 JONATHAN GOLDBERG 
 
 Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the 
 Canonization of Heterosexuality 127 
 
 JOSEPH A. PORTER 
 
 “Something Cloudy, Something Clear”: 
 Homophobic Discourse in Tennessee 
 Williams 149 
 
 JOHN M. GLUM 
 
vi Contents 
 
 Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy to 
 Gross Indecency 169 
 
 ED COHEN 
 
 Willie and Wilde: Reading The Portrait 
 ofMr.W.H. 207 
 
 WILLIAM A. COHEN 
 
 Disseminating Whitman 235 
 MICHAEL MOON 
 
 Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual 
 Fiction 255 
 ROBERT L. CASERIO 
 
 The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary 
 Theory, and AIDS 289 
 
 LEE EDELMAN 
 
 Notes on Contributors 307 
 Author Index 309 
 
Ronald R. Butters 
 
 Foreword 
 
 In 1974, Louie Crew and Rictor Norton 
 began their special gay issue of College En¬ 
 glish with a nineteen-page “editorial” en¬ 
 titled “The Homophobic Imagination.”' One 
 measure of the progress gay and lesbian 
 studies have made in the past decade and 
 a half is that such an editorial introduction 
 seems unneeded for the current volume. The 
 essays printed here evolve in a context in 
 which their right to exist—indeed, the neces¬ 
 sity of their existence—grows increasingly 
 unquestionable. Crew and Norton wrote with 
 no little wonderment at “the positive thrust 
 of [their] collection of essays as a whole,” 
 despite “the lack of a traditional groove in 
 which to work.” ^ Their landmark issue was an 
 important project in the emerging tradition 
 which the present efforts, we hope, continue 
 to create. 
 
 This is certainly not to say that “the excom¬ 
 munication of homosexual literary history” 
 has now ended in every nook and cranny of 
 the Modern Language Association, nor that 
 whatever progress we have made toward “re- 
 
2 Ronald R. Butters 
 
 claim[ing] homosexual literary reality” is in any sense complete—or 
 less subject to “deletion” by future homophobic political forces than 
 was, say, James Halliwell’s expurgation of the gay material about 
 Sir Francis Bacon’s boyfriend Godrick from the 1845 edition of Sir 
 Simonds D’Ewes’s Autobiography.^ 
 
 Moreover, in many areas of the humanities outside the literary 
 and historical disciplines represented by the essays in this volume, 
 reclamation has scarcely begun. In my own discipline, linguistics. 
 Stonewall and after might almost never have existed. In 1935 Allen 
 Walker Read, a known heterosexual (now retired from the faculty 
 of Columbia University) wrote Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evi¬ 
 dence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. It contained 
 data, collected “in the field” (largely men’s-room walls in the United 
 States) such as the following: 
 
 . . . All wishing to be sucked off get a bone on and 
 wait. I will choose the best looking pricks . . . 
 
 Yellowstone National Park, Old Faithful Camp, 
 
 Geyser Baths Swimming Pool 
 August II, 1928. 
 
 The book was privately printed in Paris in a limited edition of seventy- 
 five, with a second subtitle and a caveat printed on the title page: “A 
 Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary . . . 
 Circulation restricted to students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal 
 psychology, and allied branches of the social sciences.” Though such 
 “folk epigraphy” might seem inconsequential to the nonlinguist, what 
 Read later called his “pioneering work” is virtually the only public 
 record we have of such early twentieth-century usage compiled by a 
 trained linguist.^ It sheds light on a number of linguistic issues: for 
 example: the absence of the word gay from any of Read’s collected 
 graffiti tends to confirm the general belief among etymologists that 
 the term did not exist in its popular meaning of “homosexual” before 
 the 1950S. 
 
 Read’s is also one of the few works by a linguist in which gay 
 or lesbian materials figure at all. Indeed, any notion of what might 
 constitute gay sociolinguistics, and gay linguistics in general, is vir¬ 
 tually nonexistent. One looks in vain for references to materials on 
 
Foreword 3 
 
 homosexual subjects in either the standard introductory textbooks 
 or such important recent overview works as Frederick]. Newmeyer’s 
 The Politics of Linguistics or Michael J. Shapiro’s Language and Politi¬ 
 cal Understanding. Dennis Baron’s Grammar and Gender is concerned 
 only with heterosexual issues.* Racial discrimination based on lan¬ 
 guage has been an important subject for discussion by linguists and 
 has been the target of numerous occasions of social activism based on 
 linguistic research; however, collections of essays with titles such as 
 Discourse and Discrimination continue to be produced with no men¬ 
 tion whatever of gay men and women.* There are a few exceptions, 
 mostly in the field of lexicography (many of which have appeared in 
 American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society—and 
 1 have edited that journal for the past five years).^ Richard Spears’s 
 dictionary, while not exclusively gay in subject matter, is certainly 
 an important contribution to the field.® Deborah Tannen notes that 
 two of the six subjects in her book are gay males (and lovers) — 
 though the significance of their homosexuality is ultimately of little 
 importance to her conclusions.’ Except for dictionaries, homosexuals 
 appear in linguistics only in passing—and disparagingly and second¬ 
 hand, as in the occasional black English studies where informants are 
 quoted as speaking once in a while of punks and fags. 
 
 In great part, the proper work of linguists is still being done by 
 others (including many of the authors of the essays in this issue). For 
 example, Jan Zita Grover, who is not a professional linguist but who 
 “currently works as medical editor of an AIDS textbook,’’ offers a 
 penetrating and incisive discussion of the popular vocabulary of AIDS 
 and how this vocabulary contributes to the social and cultural con¬ 
 struction of AIDS as “artifact of social and sexual transgression, vio¬ 
 lated taboo, fractured identity—political and personal projections.” 
 Bruce Rodgers’s The Queens’ Vernacular remains the most important 
 work in gay lexicography (indeed, Julia Penelope Stanley’s article in 
 The Homosexual Imagination did little more than interpret Rodgers’s 
 data), though written by an amateur.” GaySpeak is a significant col¬ 
 lection of essays—by scholars in the field of communications, not 
 linguistics.'^ The author of Homolexis is an art historian.'* 
 
 Much less study language in a gay context, linguists, even gay ones, 
 have rarely informed their work with a sensitivity to gay and les- 
 
4 Ronald R. Butters 
 
 bian issues or reviewed the field from a homosexual perspective. For 
 example, linguists—some of them, presumably, gay— make dictionar¬ 
 ies, those cultural and social repositories where words and meanings 
 are freeze-dried for later use. Gay linguists need to unfreeze and re¬ 
 construct the dictionaries. Why, for example, should Webster’s Ninth 
 Collegiate Dictionary (1983) have two sets of usage labels, one ap¬ 
 plied mostly to derogatory terms for homosexuals (fruit, faggot, dyke, 
 queen, queer): “often used disparagingly”; another applied to most 
 racial and ethnic slurs (kike. Frog, nigger, coon): “usually taken to 
 be offensive”? It is a subtle point—one feels slightly paranoid to say 
 it—but why is fruit only “often” pejorative (for that matter, when is 
 it not?), while kike is “usually” so? More important, why emphasize 
 the offended feelings of only the ethnically slurred, while taking an 
 objective, agentive approach to the homosexual? The creature slurred 
 by nigger or coon is presented as one of “us,” the writers of dictio¬ 
 naries, an offendable human; the creature slurred by fruit or dyke is 
 some “other.” 
 
 It is easy to dismiss such observations as homosexual paranoia, or, 
 worse, trivial and unimportant. But so too was it once easy to dis¬ 
 miss the homoerotic sentiments of Leaves of Grass as the homosexual 
 reader’s fantasy, or, worse, trivial and unimportant. In 1959, when 
 1 was nineteen, 1 read Leaves of Grass and listened to Clark Griffith 
 lecture on Whitman in an American poetry course at the University 
 of Iowa. Griffith didn’t say very much about the homoerotic element 
 (though he did say more than most people were saying in 1959), but 
 1 knew, in spite of my own homophobic wishes, that the homoeroti¬ 
 cism that so tortured and delighted my private reading was no fantasy 
 of my creation, and certainly not unimportant. 
 
 Is there any need for gay linguistics in general? The authors of the 
 following essays write in a context in which such a question has 
 likewise been asked, disparagingly and discouragingly, concerning lit¬ 
 erary criticism, history, and cultural studies. While it is true that 
 the literary and cultural discourses discussed in this volume focus 
 on the homosexual male, we began our project with the hope that 
 the essays we collected would further the ongoing enterprise of both 
 lesbian and gay studies. This particular co-editor hopes as well that 
 the volume may prompt a beginning of gay studies in fields such as 
 linguistics, where little work has yet been done. 
 
Foreword 5 
 
 Postscript 
 
 This volume is a reprinting of the essays originally published in the 
 Winter 1989 issue of SAQ. The editors have added to the original 
 title. Displacing Homophobia, the subtitle Gay Male Perspectives in 
 Literature and Culture in order to indicate clearly that the articles 
 herein are almost exclusively by and about men. The editors’ original 
 charge was to select writings which considered homo/heterosexuality 
 within the framework of male experience. We do not wish to suggest 
 in any way that a consideration of homophobia as a whole is at all 
 possible without the inclusion of the experience of more than half of 
 its subjects. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 Louie Crew and Rictor Norton, "The Homophobic Imagination,” The Homosexual 
 Imagination—in literature—in the classroom—in criticism. College English 36 
 (November 1974): 272-90. 
 
 2 Ibid., 273. 
 
 3 Ibid., 277. 
 
 4 Allen Walker Read, Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epig¬ 
 raphy in Western North America (1935; reprint, Wakesha, Wis., 1977), 48, i. 
 
 5 Shapiro is not a linguist, but a professor of political science; nonetheless, his book 
 (New Haven, 1981), like Newmeyer's (Chicago, 1986) and Baron's (New Haven, 
 1986), is a pioneering work on the political aspects of the field of linguistics. 
 
 6 Discourse and Discrimination, ed. Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson and Teun A. 
 Van Dijk (Detroit, 1988). 
 
 7 For example, Julia R Stanley, “Homosexual Slang,” American Speech 45 (1970): 
 45-59: Fred R. Shapiro, “Earlier Citations for Terms Characterizing Homosexuals,” 
 American Speech 63 (1988): 383-85. A number of pioneering articles have also 
 appeared in the annual journal Maiedicta. 
 
 8 Richard Spears, Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults. 
 Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk. Homosexual Lingo, and Re¬ 
 lated Matters (New York, 1981). 
 
 9 Deborah Tannen, Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends (Norwood, 
 N.J., 1984). 
 
 10 Jan Zita Grover, “AIDS: Keywords,” October 43 (Winter 1987): 18. 
 
 11 Bruce Rodgers, The Queens' Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon (San Francisco, 1972). 
 
 12 GaySpeak: Male and Lesbian Communication, ed. James W. Cheesboro (New York, 
 1981). 
 
 13 Wayne Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality 
 (New York, 1985). 
 
i‘f.,'. « . „ '■ Lt* ■ ^ .. , 
 
 'A‘- .1' ) 5 p 
 
 
 u hi 
 
 I n 
 
 h 
 
 
 ' \i 
 
 Ini 
 
 At 
 
 ^i^ MM ' 
 
 -' i'-"’ ii; 
 
 " 4 '^lilliBl' r'-. 
 
 ^ t * • ’'' ii'H) '^' 
 
 15 ^V..^I 4 I.V(.-.^/ I'V ■••*^)• J i| n. 7! 
 
 ’• * ■•.* (S' 
 
 'WV. 
 
 I ■ '* .vW 
 
 __ 'V'I'SL 
 
 #1' ■■'» ‘t 
 
 I*"" ■ 
 
 •» I’ (fy- -.iiii/ 'X1--I mir 
 
 T'-jaarTB , '•j 
 
 1 AM JK c •. V V^1 
 
 L |i I ; . * 
 
 , t . n ,* i. . .*^ 4^1 
 
 •v i*afcr^:<,if -■ 
 
 ^ '/■’l‘AT'^1 ff'ii,' '',*J(’*isi«‘ I '' >.‘i '.'V,”'i 
 M- {.■' *■. ,1 . ,• ^ 
 
 1.v». *" *.-’■■ e‘ *y 
 
 '; /,■ ’ ( i!. 
 
 .1. ^ < '' Hitlini liiiiltir I iti" I '’i 
 
 JJ U'Vlf. 
 
 /jM({''ASi.c • ,,,^,_ 
 
 - , ,, '•“ ■ ' '' ^>1 
 
 ',*’t; v\* n ' ' ■ -I ‘+V.' • ,^ 
 
 /t-r. V., -i^jf ♦ ‘* 
 
 4 ii 
 
 !<*\iw.. ■ 4;vf/^iSr*%*4W‘!S^ ’ ^ >W0X- ’‘A 
 
 4 K<t\ 1t>< 
 
 • ■ yji 
 
 X, »'>•' r •’[^1 
 
 l» ', ,f 
 
 I* '.. 't»i' ” /'•il’ '‘i 
 
 '■ . • < .|.#« - >A<.\ Kfi 
 
 tsi'• li •^%‘' ' 
 .^, 4 -. '»"■'<' " 
 
Stephen Orgel 
 
 Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the 
 English Stage Take Boys for Women? 
 
 My title is the last line of that most Re¬ 
 naissance of modern comedies. Some Like It 
 Hot. Joe E. Brown reacts to Jack Lemmon’s 
 desperate revelation that he is not the woman 
 Brown thinks he has been wooing, but a 
 man in drag. Instead of indignantly with¬ 
 drawing his proposal of marriage, however, 
 Brown responds with cheerful complacency, 
 “Nobody’s perfect.” The moment provides an 
 appropriate setting for my own scene. 
 
 I want to rethink some basic information 
 about the English Renaissance theater. It is 
 a commonplace to observe that the stage in 
 Shakespeare’s time was an exclusively male 
 preserve, but theatrical historians tend to 
 leave the matter there, as if the fact merely 
 constituted a practical arrangement and had 
 no implications beyond its utility in a num¬ 
 ber of disguise plots. But it has very broad 
 implications, which are both cultural and 
 specifically sexual, and those are what 1 want 
 to address. To begin with, the male public 
 theater represents a uniquely English solu¬ 
 tion to the universal European disapproval 
 
8 Stephen Orgel 
 
 of actresses. No contemporary continental public theater restricted 
 the stage to men. Spain, in this as in so much else, offers a useful 
 parallel: the Spanish authorities worried the question of histrionic 
 morality with far greater zeal than the English, and in 1596 they 
 banned women from the stage; but the spectacle of transvestite boys 
 was found to be even more disturbing than that of theatrical women, 
 and the edict was rescinded four years later.' So the first puzzle, if 
 one is looking at English Renaissance theater in a European context, 
 is why this seemed a satisfactory arrangement to the English and not 
 to anyone else; or, to put it more directly, why were women mor e 
 u psetting hny«; to the English? 
 
 Second, the fact of a male theater in England is more problematic 
 than it has been made to appear; the English stage was a male pre¬ 
 serve, but the theater was not. The theater was a p lace of unusu al 
 fre edom for wom en in the period; foreign visitors comment on the 
 fact that English women go to theater unescorted and unmasked, and 
 a large proportion of the audience consisted of women. The puzzle 
 here would be why a culture that so severely regulated the lives of 
 women in every other sphere suspended its restrictions in the case 
 of theater. The fact of the large female audience must have had im¬ 
 portant consequences for the development of English popular drama. 
 It meant that the success of any play was significantly depen dent 
 on the rec eptiveness of wome n; and this in turn meant that theatri¬ 
 cal representations—whether of women or men or anything else— 
 also depended for their success to a significant degree on the recep¬ 
 tiveness of women. When we see dramatic depictions of women in 
 Elizabethan drama that we consider degrading, it has become com¬ 
 mon to explain the fact by declaring them to be male fantasies and 
 to point to the exclusively male stage to account for them. But this 
 cannot be correct; theaters are viable only insofar as they satisfy their 
 audiences. The depictions must at the very least represent cultural 
 fantasies, and women are implicated in them as well as men. 
 
 Next, it is in an important respect not quite true to say that the En¬ 
 glish public stage was exclusively male. Elizabethan theatrical com¬ 
 panies contained no women, but Italian troupes visited England on 
 occasion, and performed not only at court but throughout the coun¬ 
 try, often in conjunction with royal progresses, and therefore under 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 9 
 
 the queen’s patronage—theater in this respect, as in so many others, 
 was an extension of the court. Since Italian theater companies were 
 family affairs, they always included women, so that the English did 
 in fact from time to time see women on the stage. What they d id 
 n ot see were Enfjlish women on the stage: the distinction they main¬ 
 tained was here not betwee n men and women but l^tween “us” and 
 “them,”—what was appropriate for foreigners was not appropriate for 
 the English.^ We can tell something about how the gender question 
 was regarded by asking whether women were seen in English Renais¬ 
 sance plays as “them” rather than “us,” as the Other. A case can 
 certainly be made for this; there is a large component of male bonding 
 in Shakespeare, what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the homosocial; 
 and plays like The Merry Wives of Windsor and Othello certainly have 
 powerful elements of the-men-against-the-women, though it is not at 
 all clear, if we think of these plays in this way, who are “us” and who 
 are “them.” The men in Merry Wives lose hands down to the women, 
 and Emilia on the relationships between the sexes— 
 
 ’Tis not a year or two shows us a man. 
 
 They are all but stomachs and we all but food; 
 
 They eat us hungerly, and when they are full. 
 
 They belch us. . . . 
 
 or. 
 
 . . . jealous souls will not be answered so; 
 
 They are not ever jealous for the cause. 
 
 But jealous for they’re jealous 
 
 —certainly is not speaking as an outsider. In the context of Othello, 
 this is the normative view, the one we are expected to agree with. 
 But in a larger sense, we would have to say that there are lots of 
 others in this theater; in fact, Elizabethan drama is often dependent 
 on otherness. Comedies are Italian, French, or provincial, tragedies 
 Spanish or Scandinavian or ancient, pastorals take place somewhere 
 else. Dekker, Jonson, and Middleton placing comedies in contempo¬ 
 rary London are doing something new. The Other, for this theater, is 
 as much foreign as female—Othello is the Other. And in the largest 
 sense, the Other is theater itself, both a threat and a refuge. 
 
10 Stephen Orgel 
 
 Women are commodities in this culture, certainly, whose mar¬ 
 riages are arranged for the advantage or convenience of men, either 
 their fathers, or the male authority figures in their and their prospec¬ 
 tive husbands’ families. But this too does not distinguish women from 
 men: alliances were normally arranged for men just as for women 
 —the distinction here is between fathers and children, not between 
 the sexes; this is a patriarchal society. Fantasies of freedom in Shake¬ 
 speare tend to take the form of escapes from the tyranny of elders 
 to a world where the children can make their own society, which 
 usually means where they can arrange their own marriages. Whether 
 this is conceived as ultimately benign and restorative, as in A Mid¬ 
 summer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s 
 Tale, or disastrous, as in Othello and Romeo and Juliet, it works for 
 women as well as men: the crucial element is the restrictive father, 
 not the sex of the child. Rosalind and Orlando, Lorenzo and Jessica 
 are free to choose each other; Bertram’s marriage to Helena is no 
 less constrained than the one proposed for Juliet to the County Paris. 
 T he problem is the father or the king,or the structure of author ity, 
 not one’s gender. This is not to say that it isn’t preferable to be male 
 in the Renaissance world: obviously it is. It is the context of that 
 preference that 1 am concerned with. 
 
 1 want to begin by considering what seems to me a particularly 
 subversive version of that fantasy of freedom, the return to childhood. 
 In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, after his first flash of violent jealousy, 
 explains his distracted manner to Hermione and Polixenes in this way: 
 
 Looking on the lines 
 
 Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil 
 Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreeched. 
 
 In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled. 
 
 Lest it should bite its master, and so prove. 
 
 As ornaments oft do, too dangerous. 
 
 The return to childhood here is also a retreat from sexuality and the 
 dangers of manhood exemplified in unmuzzled daggers. Leontes sees 
 himself “unbreeched,” not yet in breeches: Elizabethan children of 
 
Nobody's Perfect II 
 
 both sexes were dressed in skirts until the age of seven or so; the 
 “breeching” of boys was the formal move out of the common gen¬ 
 der of childhood, which was both female in appearance and largely 
 controlled by women, and into the world of men. This event was 
 traditionally the occasion for a significant family ceremony. 
 
 The childhood to which Leontes imagines himself returning has 
 been described by Polixenes as Edenic, and specifically presexual: 
 
 We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’sun. 
 
 And bleat the one at th’other; what we changed 
 Was innocence for innocence: we knew not 
 The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed 
 That any did; had we pursued that life. 
 
 And our weak spirits ne’er been higher reared 
 With stronger blood, we should have answered heaven 
 Boldly “not guilty,” the imposition cleared 
 Hereditary ours. 
 
 This is a world without vice and without temptation, in which even 
 original sin appears to have been dealt with. There are no women in 
 it, only the best friend, an emotional twin. 
 
 At this point Hermione enters the fantasy with a pertinent obser¬ 
 vation: “By this we gather / You have tripped since.” Polixenes agrees: 
 the fall from grace is a fall into sexuality: 
 
 O my most sacred lady. 
 
 Temptations have been born to’s, for 
 In those unfledged days was my wife a girl: 
 
 Your precious self had not yet crossed the eyes 
 Of my young playfellow. 
 
 Hermione both protests and concurs: 
 
 Of this make no conclusion, lest you say 
 Your queen and I are devils. Yet go on, 
 
 Th’ offences we have made you do we’ll answer. 
 
 If you first sinned with us, and that with us 
 You did continue fault, and that you slipped not 
 With any but with us. 
 
12 Stephen Orgel 
 
 However good-natured their banter, Hermione’s projected conclusion 
 is the logical one: “your queen and 1 are devils.” Her teasing view of 
 marriage as a continuing state of sin with diabolical agents repeats 
 the view of sexuality implicit in the men’s fantasy. 
 
 It is impossible to say what particular word or gesture triggers 
 Leontes’ paranoid jealousy, but the translation of the inseparable 
 friend into the dangerous rival and of the chaste wife into a whore 
 is similarly implicit in the fantasy, its worst-case scenario, so to 
 speak, replicating the situation Shakespeare had imagined with such 
 detailed intensity in the dark lady sonnets. And when Leontes re¬ 
 treats from it he is retreating not only from women and sex: he is 
 retreating from his place in one of the very few normative families 
 in Shakespeare—families consisting of father, mother, and children. 
 Most families in Shakespeare have only one parent; the very few 
 that include both parents generally have only one child, and when 
 that configuration appears, it tends to be presented as Leontes’ mar¬ 
 riage is presented, as exceedingly dangerous to the child: we may 
 take as examples Juliet and her parents, Macduff and Lady Macduff, 
 Coriolanus and Virgilia, the Duke and Duchess of York arguing about 
 whether to denounce their son as a traitor. It is a configuration that, 
 with the single exception of the Page family in The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor, never appears in comedy. 
 
 Marriage is a dangerous condition in Shakespeare. We are always 
 told that comedies end in marriages. A few of Shakespeare’s do, but 
 the much more characteristic Shakespearean conclusion comes just 
 before the marriage, and sometimes, as in Love’s Labor’s Lost and 
 Twelfth Night, with an entirely unexpected delay or postponement. 
 Plays that continue beyond the point where comedy ends, with the 
 old fogies defeated and a happy marriage successfully concluded, de¬ 
 pict the condition as utterly disastrous: Romeo and Juliet, Othello. 
 Most Shakespearean marriages of longer duration are equally dis¬ 
 heartening, with shrewishness, jealousy, and manipulativeness the 
 norm in comedy, and real destructiveness in tragedy: Oberon and 
 Titania, the Merry Wives, Capulet and Lady Capulet, Claudius and 
 Gertrude, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Cymbeline and his queen, 
 Antigonus and Paulina. 
 
 In fact, relationships between men and women interest Shake- 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 13 
 
 speare intensely, but not, on the whole, as husbands and wives. 1 
 might even go on to say not on the whole as men and women; a 
 significant n umber of plays require the woman to become a man f or 
 the wooi ng to be effected. T he dangers of women in erotic situations, 
 whatever they may be, can be disarmed by having the women play 
 men, just as in the theater the dangers of women on the stage (what¬ 
 ever they may be) can be disarmed by having men play the women. 
 The interchangeability of the sexes is an essential assumption of this 
 theater. 
 
 It is also an assumption of the culture as a whole. For us the entire 
 question of gender is controlled by issues of sexuality, and we are 
 quite clear about which sex is which. But for the Renaissance the 
 line between the sexes was blurred, often frighteningly so. Medical 
 and anatomical treatises from the time of Galen cited homologies in 
 the genital structure of the sexes to show that male and female were 
 versions of the same unitary species.^ The female genitals w ere-simply 
 the mal e genitals inverted, and carried internally rather than exter¬ 
 nally. Sexual experience was conceived to be the same in both; during 
 coitus, both not only experience orgasm but ejaculate, and female 
 ejaculation with its component of female seed is just as necessary for 
 conception as male ejaculation is. Both male and female seeds are 
 present in every foetus; a foetus bec omes male rather than, female 
 if the male seed is dominant and generates enough heaj to press 
 the genital organs outward—if, that is, the foetus is strongy^^with 
 strength being con ceived as heat .^ Analogously, and logically, many 
 cases were recorded of women becoming men through the pressure 
 of some great excitement or activity. The crucial point is, however, 
 that those transformations that are attested to as scientific fact work 
 in o nly one direction, from female to male, w hich is conceived to be 
 upward, toward completion. Indeed, the function of sexual pleasure 
 is generally said in the medical literature to be that it enables men 
 to overcome their natural revulsion at the imperfection of women, 
 and enables women to overcome their natural distaste for and fear of 
 childbearing, which would mean, in Renaissance terms, their distaste 
 for being women. 
 
14 Stephen Orgel 
 
 Such claims, of course, are not merely scientific, but imply (like 
 the scientific claims of all eras, including our own) a political agenda. 
 The homologies they cite are only anatomical, and imply no egali¬ 
 tarian bias; most of the scholastic opinion codified by Ian Maclean 
 in The Renaissance Notion of Women stresses the differences between 
 men and women, not their similarities. Women are less intelligent, 
 more passionate, less in control of their affections, and so forth. The 
 difference in degree of perfection becomes in practical terms a power¬ 
 ful difference in kind, and the scientific arguments are used to justify 
 the whole range of male domination over women. The frightening 
 part of the teleology for the Renaissance mind, however, is precisely 
 the fantasy of its reversal, t he conviction that men can turn int o— 
 or be turned into—women: or perhaps more exactly, can be turned 
 back into wo men, losing the strength that enabled the male potential 
 to be realized in the first place. In the medical literature we all start 
 as women, and the culture confirmed this by dressing all children in 
 skirts until the age of seven or so, when the boy, as Leontes recalls, 
 was “breeched,” or put into pants, and began to be trained as a man. 
 From this point on, for a man to associate with women was felt to be 
 increasingly dangerous—not only for the woman, but even more for 
 the man: lust effeminates, makes men incapable of manly pursuits: 
 hence the pervasive antithesis of love and war. Thomas Wright, in 
 The Tassions of the Mind in General, warning against the dangers of 
 love, writes that “a personable body is often linked with a pestilent 
 soul; a valiant Captain in the field for the most part is infected with 
 an effeminate affection at home”* (the effeminate affection being his 
 passion for women), and Romeo, berating himself for his unwilling¬ 
 ness to harm Tybalt, cries out, 
 
 O sweet Juliet, 
 
 Thy beauty hath made me effeminate. 
 
 And in my temper softened valor’s steel! 
 
 Such formulations are all but axiomatic in the period, and the word 
 “effeminate,” over and over, serves the basic explanatory function 
 in them. Women are dangerous to men because sexual passion for 
 women renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality 
 itself is misogynistic, as the love of women threatens the integrity of 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 15 
 
 the perilously achieved male identity. The fear of effeminization is a 
 central element in all discussions of what constitutes a “real man” in 
 the period, and the fantasy of the reversal of the natural transition 
 from woman to man underlies it. It also, in a much more clearly 
 pathological way, underlies the standard arguments against the stage 
 in anti-theatrical tracts from the time of the church fathers on. In 
 this context, the very institution of theater is a threat to manhood 
 and the stability of the social hierarchy, as unescorted women and 
 men without their wives socialize freely, and (it follows) flirt with 
 each other and take each other off to bed: the association of theater 
 with sex is absolutely pervasive in these polemics. 
 
 But in England, the sexuality feared is more subversive than even 
 this suggests, precisely because of the transvestism of the stage. It 
 is argued first that the boys who perform the roles of women will 
 be transformed into their roles and play the part in reality. This 
 claim has its basis in a platonic argument, but in the puritan tracts it 
 merges with a general fear of blurred social and sexual boundaries, 
 of roles and costumes adulterating the essences that God has given 
 us. Jonas Barish, in his exhaustive and indispensable study of the 
 anti-theatrical material, relates-th£ hos tilit y to t ransvestite act ors to 
 the SynchjOnOUS revival of medieval cnmptnaryjavy*; the attempt to 
 prevent members of one social clay; fimrn appe aring t o be members 
 of aiiother (thus tradesmen were enjoined from wearing silk), and 
 he quotes William Perkins to the effect that “wanton and excessive 
 apparel . . . maketh a confusion of such degrees and callings as God 
 hath ordained.” “Distinctions of dress,” Barish comments, “however 
 external and theatrical they may seem to us, for Perkins virtually 
 belong to our essence, and may no more be tampered with than that 
 essence itself.”* This is certainly the way the polemicists view the 
 situation; but it is precisely the essence that is the problem. What is 
 our God-given essence, that it can be transformed by the clothes we 
 wear? Philip Stubbes, in a passage that bears directly on the question 
 of transvestite actors, deplores a current (and recurrent) fashion of 
 masculine dress for women. “Our apparel,” he says, “was given us as 
 a sign distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, and therefore one 
 to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, 
 and to adulterate the verity of his own kind. Wherefore these women 
 
16 Stephen Or gel 
 
 may not improperly be called Hermaphrodki, that is, monsters of 
 both kinds, half women, half men.”^ It is the fragility, the radical 
 instability of our essence, that is assumed here, and the metamorphic 
 quality of our sinful nature. The enormous popularity of Ovid in the 
 age reflects both its desires and its deepest fears. 
 
 But the argument against transvestite actors warns of an even more 
 frightening metamorphosis than the transformation of the boy into a 
 monster of both kinds. Male spectators, it is argued, will be seduced 
 by the impersonation, and, lo sing their reason, will become effemi- 
 natej_which iiTThisTase means they will l ust not after the woin an in 
 the drama, vvTiiini”wourd be bad enough,, but after the boy^bejjeath 
 the woman’s costume, thereby playing the woman^s role themselves . 
 This fear, which has been brilliantly anatomized by Laura Levine, 
 is so pervasive in the tracts, and so unlike modern kinds of sexual 
 anxiety, that it is worth pausing over.® 
 
 John Rainolds says the adoption by men of women’s clothing kin¬ 
 dles “great sparkles of lust,” and, citing the authority of Socrates, 
 compares the homosexual response engendered by transvestite boys 
 to the sting of poisonous spiders: “if they do but touch men only 
 with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them 
 mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a 
 kind of poison. . . Here the attraction of men to beautiful boys 
 is treated as axiomatic; the assumption behind this hysterical (and 
 very ambivalent) warning is that to try boys will be to prefer them 
 to women; though the passage, as it continues, is equally vehement 
 against heterosexuality. Similarly for William Prynne, the trans¬ 
 vestism of the stage is especially dangerous because female dress is an 
 important stimulant to homosexuality: the “male priests of Venus” 
 satisfy their companions, the “passive beastly sodomites of Florida,” 
 by wearing women’s clothes, the “better to elicit, countenance, act 
 and color their unnatural execrable uncleannesses.Jhe implica- 
 tio n is th at the heterosexual titration is a cover for the homosexual 
 responsebeneathTWoflce^Tso that the transvestite is not the passive 
 one in this relationship. 
 
 RaihTilds, Prynne, and any number of other anti-theatrical writers 
 offer observations such as these as models for the theatrical experi¬ 
 ence. For such writers, the fact that women are prohibited from 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 17 
 
 the stage reveals the true etiology of theater: what the spectator 
 is “really” attracted to in plays is men—the deepest fear in anti¬ 
 theatrical tracts, far deeper than the fear that wom e n in the audie nce 
 will become whor es, is the f ear of a unive rsal effeminizatio n. The 
 growth of desire through the experience of theater is a sinister pro¬ 
 gression: the play excites the spectator and sends him home to “per¬ 
 form” himself; the result is sexual abandon with one’s wife, or more 
 often with any available woman (all women at the playhouse being 
 considered available), or worst of all—and this is a claim that re¬ 
 curs throughout the literature—the spectat or begins by lusting after 
 a female character, but ends by havm&_sex_with the^man she-“really” 
 is^Philip Stubbes gives a particularly clear statement of this anxiety: 
 “the fruits of plays and interludes” are, he says, that after theater, 
 “everyone brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in 
 their secret conclaves they play sodomite or worse.”" What is worse 
 is presumably the sodomized. 
 
 The assumption behind all these assertions is, first, that the basic 
 form of response to theater is erotic: second, that erotically, theater 
 is uncontrollably exciting; and third, that the basic, essential form 
 of erotic excitement in men is homosexual—that, indeed, women 
 are only a cover for men. And though the assumption in this form is 
 clearly pathological, it is also clearly related to anatomical theories of 
 the essential homology of male and female—to claims that male and 
 female are versions of each other, that the female is an incomplete 
 male, and that it is therefore possible for her even, given enough 
 excitement, to mutate naturally into the male. The fears, that is, are 
 grounded in what is recognized as fact. 
 
 But why, then, if boys in women’s dress are so threatening, did the 
 English maintain a transvestite theater? It is necessary to remember 
 that anti-theatrical tracts are pathological. They share assumptions 
 with the culture as a whole, but their conclusions are eccentric. 
 Stephen Greenblatt, in a brilliant essay, relates the development of 
 the transvestite stage precisely to the cultural tropes of the body as 
 they are anatomized in the medical and gynecological theories of the 
 age, and he concludes that “a conception of gender that is teleologi- 
 
18 Stephen Orgel 
 
 cally male and insists upon a verifiable sign to confirm nature’s final 
 cause finds its supreme literary expression in a transvestite theater.” 
 This is an exciting and attractive thesis, but the problem with it is 
 that the medical theorists are for the most part French and Italian, 
 and France and Italy did not develop transvestite theaters. Why did 
 only the English public theater resist the introduction of women on 
 the stage? 1 should say at once that 1 cannot answer this question, but 
 the reasons must have to do with culture-specific attitudes toward 
 women, and toward sexuality. 
 
 Despite the anxiety expressed in the anti-theatrical literature, En¬ 
 glish Renaissance culture, to judge from the surviving evidence, did 
 not display a morbid fear of homosexuality. Anxiety about the fidel¬ 
 ity of women, on the other hand, does seem to have been strikingly 
 prevalent; this is clear from nonliterary sources. Katharine Mans cites 
 recent studies of sixteenth-century ecclesiastical courts in Essex and 
 York which reveal that most of the defamation suits were prompted 
 by three insulting terms: c uckold, whore, and whoremaster.*^ The 
 fear of losing control of women’s chastity, a very valuable possession 
 that guaranteed the legitimacy of one’s heirs, and especially valuable 
 for fathers as a piece of disposable property, is a logical consequence 
 of a patriarchal structure—as the figure of Prospero makes clear. One 
 would have to have parallel statistics from Spain, Erance, and Italy to 
 know how much explanatory value the defamation records have; cer¬ 
 tainly cuckoldry seems to have been very much on the Italian mind 
 in the Renaissance. But these figures help to indicate the extent to 
 which theater served as a means of managing specifically sexual anxi¬ 
 eties: Mans notes that the incidence of cuckoldry plots is much higher 
 in the drama than in the other imaginative genres in the period. 
 
 As far as paternal prerogatives were concerned, there were suffi¬ 
 cient ambiguities within the English system to justify the anxieties 
 of a father who assumed his rights over the disposition of his child 
 to be absolute. Fathers were legally entitled to arrange their daugh¬ 
 ters’ marriages as they saw fit, and of course had control of all prop¬ 
 erty that accompanied the daughter: but the legal age of consent 
 was twelve for women (fourteen for men), which meant that daugh¬ 
 ters over the age of twelve were also legally entitled to arrange their 
 own marriages. They might make themselves paupers by doing so. 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 19 
 
 but they could not be stopped.The horror stories of enforced mar¬ 
 riages—there are many in the period—relate primarily to upper-class 
 matches, where political alliances and large sums of money were at 
 stake. In such cases, what the age of consent meant in practice was 
 merely that a woman could not be forced to consent to a marriage 
 arranged by her father before she reached the age of twelve. 
 
 Middle- and lower-class arrangements, however, would have been 
 much less constrained. Indeed, middle-class Lo ndon was a place of 
 unusual libert y for wome n, and this certainly bears on both the popu¬ 
 larity of the London theater with women and their relative freedom 
 to enjoy it: the professional theater drew its support largely from 
 London’s properous mercantile and artisan classes. It also probably 
 accounts for the proliferati on of plays a bout both love niatches and 
 cuckoldry, the two sides of the notion of liberty for women. Such 
 liberating theatrical freedom, of course, could be seen as dangerous 
 and anarchic, and the source of the danger was generally claimed to 
 be sexual. 
 
 Public theater is regularly associated, moreover, not only with 
 loose women but with homosexual prostitution: the latter charge is 
 found not only in puritan polemicists but in the playwrights them¬ 
 selves. Yet the attitude implied in the charge tends to be, surprisingly, 
 liberal and permissive. In Middleton’s Father Hubbard’s Tales, a bud¬ 
 ding London rake is advised “to call in at the Blackfriars, where he 
 should see a nest of boys able to ravish a man.”'* In Jonson’s Poet¬ 
 aster, Ovid’s father, learning that Ovid has become a playwright, and 
 fearing that he will go on to be an actor, says, “What, shall I have my 
 son a stager now, an ingle for players ...?’’ (1.2.15-16). An ingle is 
 a catamite; Alan Bray cites this and several other examples to show 
 that the association was a common one.'* But the theaters were not 
 therefore closed or avoided by decent folk. The crime of sodomy is in¬ 
 veighed against repeatedly and energetically in legal and theological 
 contexts: but, as Bray demonstrates, it was scarcely ever prosecuted. 
 When cases of homosexual behavior reach the courts, they are dealt 
 with on the whole with surprising moderation—admonitions, exhor¬ 
 tations to abstain. In fact, again, women are felt to pose the more 
 serious problem; heterosexual fornicatio n was much more en ergeti- 
 cally prosecuted. Magistrates took an interest in such cases because 
 
20 Stephen Orgel 
 
 t hey resulted in illegitima te births, which increased the poor rolls, 
 whereas, unless the activity involved coercion..or malfeasance, there 
 was rarely_anything in homosexuality wort h bothering abo ut. 
 
 In one extraordinary case discussed by Bray, a laborer named Mere¬ 
 dith Davy was brought before the magistrate on what certainly could 
 have been a charge of sodomy. Davy slept in the same bed with a 
 twelve-year-old apprentice, and a third man slept in the same room. 
 On a number of occasions the third man heard activity in the other 
 bed, and heard the boy protest and cry out in pain. It took about a 
 month for the witness to realize what was happening, and he finally 
 reported it to the mistress of the house, who referred the case to 
 the magistrate. The defendant appeared baffled by the charge, and 
 clearly had no conception that what he was doing was related to the 
 abominable crime of sodomy. This, surprisingly, seemed sufficient 
 mitigation to the magistrate, and to the household as a whole; Davy 
 was sent home with an admonishment to leave the boy alone, “since 
 which time,” the court report concludes, “he hath lain quietly with 
 him.”'^ The two, that is, were allowed to continue to sleep together; 
 and it is conceivable that things quieted down not because Davy 
 stopped making advances but because the boy stopped objecting—it 
 was not, after all, the boy who made the complaint. 
 
 Bray argues that such a story does not testily to any remarkable tol¬ 
 erance on the part of the English, but rather to a selective blindness: 
 sodomy was something that, despite a number of explicit and well- 
 known prosecutions—the cases of Nicholas Udall, Francis Bacon, the 
 Castlehaven scandal—the English associate on the whole only with 
 foreigners, riot with themselves. Travelers observing it in the rela¬ 
 tively tolerant climates of Italy, Turkey, North Africa, and Russia 
 use it as an index to the viciousness of Catholic, Muslim, or barbaric 
 societies.'® And yet when, at the opening of Epicoene (1.1.23), Cleri- 
 mont is shown with a page boy who is described as “his ingle,” the 
 fact serves as nothing more than one of a number of indices to the 
 easy life of a London playboy. Charges of sodomy always occur in 
 relation to other kinds of subversion: the activity has no independent 
 existence in the Renaissance mind, just as there is no separate cate¬ 
 gory of the homosexual. It becomes visible in Elizabethan society 
 only when it intersects with some other behavior that is recognized 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 21 
 
 as dangerous and antisocial; it is invariably an aspect of atheism, 
 papistry, sedition, witchcraft. The puritan charge that theater pro¬ 
 motes homosexuality appears because to the puritan mind theater 
 is felt to be dangerous, not the other way around; sodomy becomes 
 the visible sign of its subversiveness. King James’s public and overtly 
 physical displays of affection for young men are frequently remarked 
 in the period; they are considered to be in bad taste (as are the king’s 
 manners generally), but not even the most rabid puritan connects 
 them with the abominable crime against nature.” 
 
 And yet the Jacobean court, at least from the perspective of Charles 
 I’s Whitehall, was felt to be especially hospitable to homosexuality. 
 Lucy Hutchinson, whose husband was a Roundhead colonel, saw in 
 this a significant element in the transition from Jacobean to Caroline: 
 
 The face of the court was much changed in the change of the 
 king, for King Charles was temperate, chaste and serious; so that 
 the fools and bawds, mimics and catamites of the former court 
 grew out of fashion; and the nobility and courtiers, who did not 
 quite abandon their debaucheries, yet so reverenced the king as 
 to retire into corners to practise them.^“ 
 
 The disapproval of this puritan woman discussing the debaucheries 
 of catamites is colored by neither anxiety nor outrage. Tastes, she 
 merely observes, change. Here, for comparison, is a passage from a 
 letter written to Buckingham by King James: 
 
 ... 1 cannot content myself without sending you this present, 
 praying God that 1 may have a joyful and comfortable meeting 
 with you and that we may make at this Christmas a new mar¬ 
 riage ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as 1 desire 
 only to live in the world for your sake, and that 1 had rather live 
 banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful 
 widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child 
 and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear 
 dad and husband. James R.^' 
 
 The metamorphic quality James adopts in this rhetoric is notable; 
 he proposes marriage to Buckingham, and then imagines himself in 
 succession as widow, father, and husband, and Buckingham as his 
 
22 Stephen Orgel 
 
 child and wife. The interchangeability of gender is here an essential 
 element of the language of Eros; this is the other side of the fear that 
 love effeminates. 
 
 Though there are any number of passionate heterosexual relation¬ 
 ships depicted in English Renaissance literature, it is a commonplace 
 to find a generalized misogyny in the work of the period, even in its 
 idealization of chaste and beautiful women who are also cold and 
 untouchable. What is less often observed is that along with the vari¬ 
 eties of conventional romance, romantic and even erotic homosexual 
 relationships also figure from time to time in the literature of the 
 period, in a context that is often—though certainly not invariably 
 —positive, and registers again surprisingly little anxiety about the 
 matter. 1 am not talking here about what in modern terms would be 
 called male bonding, where no explicit sexual component is acknowl¬ 
 edged; though there certainly is a good deal of that in Renaissance 
 literature. I am talking about explicitly homosexual relationships. 
 Consider the fact that Rosalind disguised as a boy can play a wooing 
 scene with another man under the name Ganymede. The peculiar and 
 pathological element in this is not that Orlando is therefore involved 
 in playing a love scene with a man. It is that so few critics (and none 
 cited in the Variorum) have ever remarked that the model for it must 
 be a homosexual flirtation; the name Ganymede cannot be used in 
 the Renaissance without this connotation. But there is no indicat ion 
 whatever that Shakespeare is doing jornethin g se xually daring there, 
 skating on thin ice.'Counterexamples in which homosexual behavior 
 leads to disaster are exceedingly rare. The only clear-cut theatrical 
 one is in Marlowe’s Edward II (and in the career of Marlowe gener¬ 
 ally), and 1 shall return to this; but first Td like to cite a number of 
 other instances. 
 
 The young shepherd Colin in the January eclogue of The Shepherd's 
 Calendar rejects the advances of the older shepherd Hobbinol, “Albe 
 my love he seek with daily suit: / His clownish gifts and curtsies 1 
 disdain” (56-57). Colin instead pursues the unresponsive Rosalind. 
 HobbinoTs flirtation is presented simply as part of the poet-shepherd’s 
 experience; but since Colin is identified in the book as Spenser and 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 23 
 
 Hobbinol as Gabriel Harvey, the allusion seems to have a specific 
 application as well, to be saying something about the relationship 
 between Spenser and Harvey. Spenser clearly does not consider this 
 libelous, and judging from their continued association, neither did 
 Harvey. But it makes the volume’s editor, E. K., nervous: in glossing 
 the passage he duly cites the relevant classical precedents of Socrates 
 and Alcibiades. These lead him to the conclusion that “paederistike 
 [is] much to be preferred before gynerastike, that is the love which 
 enflameth men with lust toward womankind.” He adds at this point 
 in his gloss on line 59 that he is not thereby condoning (or, presum¬ 
 ably, implying that Harvey is guilty of) the “execrable and horrible 
 sins of forbidden and unlawful fleshliness” celebrated by Lucian and 
 Pietro Aretino. 
 
 The strategy here is significant, and to modern eyes puzzling. In 
 order to disarm the allusion, E. K. need only have cited Virgil’s sec¬ 
 ond eclogue, which he has already recognized as one of Spenser’s 
 principal sources: here the poet imitateth Virgil. But instead he gives 
 an argument from classical authority in defence of pederasty and 
 against heterosexual love. This is entirely unnecessary as a strategy 
 on Spenser’s behalf, since Colin has rejected Hobbinol in favor of 
 Rosalind. Nevertheless, E. K. w ant * ? insis t on the privileged slatus 
 of homosex ualit y, not as ai^ aspec^ of poetry, but of the highest moral 
 philosophy—Socrates authoriz ed it . To do this it is only necessary to 
 deflect the prohibited aspects of homosexual behavior onto women 
 on the one hand, and Italians on the other. It is important to observe 
 that despite Colin’s interest in Rosalind, there is no argument here in 
 favor of the love of women, and that homosexual love is defined in 
 opposition to heterosexuality, which is equated with lust. 
 
 Marlowe, in Hero and Leander, expresses a good deal more en¬ 
 thusiasm for the physical side of homoeroticism. He also, like the 
 anti-theatrical polemicists, assumes the interchangeability of male 
 and female, though this is a source of excitement rather than panic. 
 When Leander is first described, he is praised primarily for his erotic 
 effect on men. Cynthia, apparently alone among women, “wished 
 his arms might be her sphere”: whereas Leander’s hair “Would have 
 allured the venturous youth of Greece / To hazard more than for the 
 Golden Fleece.” Leander could have replaced Ganymede as Jove’s cup- 
 
24 Stephen Orgel 
 
 bearer; if Hippolytus had seen Leander, he would have abandoned 
 his chastity and fallen in love with him; the rudest peasant and the 
 barbarous Thracian soldier sought his favor. After this, it is not sur¬ 
 prising that he attracts the attentions of Neptune, who mistakes him 
 for Ganymede and is described in an extraordinarily explicit passage 
 making passes at Leander as he swims naked to Sestos. The episode 
 is notable for the total lack of anxiety it projects. It is comic, and 
 enthusiastic. 
 
 In Troilus and Cressida, Patroclus urges Achilles to return to the 
 battlefield: 
 
 To this effect, Achilles, have I moved you. 
 
 A woman impudent and mannish grown 
 Is not more loathed than an effeminate man 
 In time of action. I stand condemned for this. 
 
 They think my little stomach to the war 
 And your great love to me restrains you thus. 
 
 Sweet, rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid 
 Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold 
 And, like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane. 
 
 Be shook to air. 
 
 The language is the language of love, but the terms might have been 
 borrowed from any polemicist; and Thersites comes straight out with 
 it: there is nothing platonic about the relationship between the two 
 heroes— Patroclus is “Achilles’ male varlet . —ius ^mas uiiilinp-who re.’’ 
 Thersites is not the most reliable of witnesses, but the play makes 
 no attempt to represent Achilles and Patroclus as innocent of the 
 abominable crime. Achilles is unmanned, however, by love itself, not 
 by its object, which turns out at the crucial moment to be female as 
 well as male. He is also in love with Priam’s daughter Polyxena, and 
 the love of women proves finally more antithetical to the claims of 
 martial heroism than the love of men: 
 
 My sweet Patroclus, I am thwarted quite 
 From my great purpose in tomorrow’s battle. 
 
 Here is a letter from Queen Hecuba, 
 
 A token from her daughter, my fair love. 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 25 
 
 Both taxing me and gaging me to keep 
 An oath that I have sworn. I will not break it. 
 
 Fall Greeks, fail fame, honor or go or stay. 
 
 My major vow lies here; this I’ll obey. 
 
 To my knowledge the only dramatic instance of a homosexual 
 relationship presented in the terms in which the culture formally 
 conceived it—as antisocial, seditious, ultimately disastrous—is in 
 Marlowe’s Edward II. It would certainly be possible to account for 
 its perspective, if not for its uniqueness, by viewing it in the con¬ 
 text of Sedgwick’s thesis about Renaissance homosexuality: that it 
 was not viewed as threatening because it was not defined in oppo¬ 
 sition to, or as an impediment to, heterosexuality and marriage.” 
 Edward’s love for Gaveston is destructive because it is presented as 
 anti-heterosexual; it renders him an unfit husband, as his passion 
 renders him an unfit king. 1 am not happy with this explanation 
 not because there is anything wrong with it, but because it is too 
 straightforward to account for what seems to me a very devious and 
 genuinely subversive play. Both politically and morally, the power- 
 hungry nobles and the queen’s adultery with Mortimer are as destabi¬ 
 lizing as anything in Edward’s relationship with his favorite, and the 
 real complaint against Gaveston has nothing to do with his sexuality, 
 but with the fact that he is being given preferments over other power¬ 
 ful and ambitious courtiers. Eor Marlowe to translate_the_whole range 
 of power polit ic s into sodomy certainly says something abou t his 
 tastes and that of Elizabethan audiences, but it also has to added 
 that it was probably safer to represent the power structure in that 
 way than it would have been to play it, so to speak, straight. Had 
 Richard 11 been presented as a sodomite, would the authorities have 
 found it necessary to censor the deposition scene? Maybe Edward’s 
 sexuality is a way of protecting the play, a way of keeping what it 
 says about power intact. This is the work of Marlowe the government 
 spy, at once an agent of the establishment and deeply subversive. And 
 if we look forward, Edward’s relation to Gaveston provides so clear 
 a mirror of King James’s behavior toward Carr, Buckingham, and the 
 other favorites that it is startling to find that the play was reissued 
 in i 6 i 2 and performed publicly in 1622. Its subject is advertised on 
 
26 Stephen Or gel 
 
 the title page, as it had been in the original edition, as “the tragic 
 fall of Mortimer.” In fact, in 1621, in an inflammatory parliamentary 
 speech. Sir Henry Yelverton had made the analogy between James’s 
 treatment of Buckingham and Edward’s of his favorites explicit—the 
 particular favorite cited was not Gaveston but his successor Hugh 
 Spencer, but the point was not lost on James and Buckingham. James 
 demanded a retraction on the grounds that the comparison repre¬ 
 sented him as a weak king, and Yelverton was forced to apologize and 
 was heavily fined.” Had it been possible for a Jacobean audience to 
 acknowledge sodomy as an English vice, the play, and the allusion, 
 would have been treasonable. 
 
 Homosexuality in this culture a pp ea^^o have heeij less.idueatening 
 than heterosexuality, and only in part because, it ha d fewer con- 
 sequences a nd was easie r to desexuaUze. The reason always given 
 for the prohibition of women from the stage was that their chastity 
 would thereby be compromised, which is understood to mean that 
 they would become whores. Behind the outrage of public modesty is 
 a real fear of women’s sexuality, and more specifically, of its power 
 to evoke men’s sexuality. This is dangerous because it is not subject 
 to rational control, which is a way of saying that it is not subject to 
 any other kind of authority either—what from one perspective was 
 slavery to passion, from another was a declaration of independence. 
 This bears on the question of what women found attractive about 
 a theater we find misogynistic—the end of The Merchant of Venice, 
 with Portia’s and Nerissa’s ring trick, plays on both the male fears 
 and the female fantasies of a patriarchal society. 
 
 Shakespearean drama often confronts these anxieties; comedy 
 looks for ways to control them, they constitute a subject for tragedy. 
 Othello’s and lago’s assumptions about Desdemona, and about 
 women generally, include all the familiar claims of Renaissance trea¬ 
 tises on women and the dangers of the stage; they are false in this 
 case, but Desdemona’s chastity does not save her or Othello from 
 a tragic outcome. Moreover, critics with patriarchal leanings might 
 argue, and have on occasion done so, that the real source of the trage¬ 
 dies of Desdemona and Juliet is their refusal to obey their fathers. 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 27 
 
 their insistence on choosing their own husbands. In one respect, 
 these plays exemplify a perfectly standard patriarchalist and anti¬ 
 feminist line, and though Elizabethan audiences would certainly have 
 responded to their tragic force, it is doubtful that any Elizabethan 
 spectator would have found them subversive. 
 
 Greenblatt has related the transvestism of hgures like Portia, 
 Rosalind, and Viola to the teleology of masculinity implied by the 
 medical and gynecological theories cited earlier. Such figures, in this 
 reading, “pass through the state of being men in order to become 
 women. Shakespearean women are in this sense the projected mir¬ 
 ror images of masculine self-differentiation.”^'’ But even this clearly 
 has its anxieties: Shakespeare shows on occasion an unwillingness to 
 allow them to return to being women. Viola announces in the final 
 moments of Twelfth Night that she cannot become a woman and the 
 wife of Orsino until her woman’s clothes have been recovered—a 
 dress borrowed from Olivia or a new one purchased for the occasion 
 apparently are not options—and that this will require the release of 
 the sea captain who alone can find them, which in turn will neces¬ 
 sitate the mollification of the enraged Malvolio, who has had the sea 
 captain incarcerated: this all materializes out of nowhere in the last 
 three minutes of the play. And Malvolio at the play’s end offers no 
 assistance but runs from the stage shouting “I’ll be revenged on the 
 whole pack of you.” For Viola to become a woman requires, in short, 
 a new play with Malvolio at its center. Rosalind, speaking the epi¬ 
 logue to As You Like It, reminds us that she is a boy, and that the 
 drama has not represented an erotic and heterosexual reality at all: 
 “If 1 were a woman, 1 would kiss as many of you as have beards that 
 pleased me. . . .” This is the only place in Shakespeare where the hero¬ 
 ine undoes her gender in this way (though Cleopatra at one moment 
 approaches it). And yet Rosalind is surely among the most attractive 
 and successful of Shakespeare’s women: it must be to the point that 
 Shakespeare does not want to leave her intact. 1 think it is also to the 
 point that Twelfth Night includes the only overtly homosexual couple 
 in Shakespeare except for Achilles and Patroclus. What the presence 
 of Antonio and Sebastian acknowledges, in a play that has at its cen¬ 
 ter a man wooing a man, is that men do fall in love with other m en. 
 “You are betrothM,” Sebastian tells Olivia, “to a man and maid,” re- 
 
28 Stephen Orgel 
 
 calling the master-mistress of Shakespeare’s passion in the sonnets. 
 The same point is made by giving Rosalind the name Ganymede. 
 
 Finally, a brief observation about Olivia. She is referred to twice as 
 the Countess Olivia, and Malvolio imagines himself becoming Count 
 Malvolio by marrying her. In the English peerage, the only way for 
 Olivia to be a countess would be as the wife or the widow of an earl. 
 But Olivia is as yet unmarried. Her father, however, was a count, and 
 Shakespeare seems to be using the Italian system, in which all the 
 children of a nobleman inherit the title. But there is no system in 
 which a man can become a count by marrying a countess. Malvol io 
 will raise his status by marrying Olivia only if Olivia is also a man. 
 
 Notes 
 
 For references and valuable suggestions, I am indebted to A. R. Braunmuller, David 
 Halperin, Ursula Fleise, Karen Newman, David Riggs, Winfried Schleiner, and Marion 
 Trousdale. 
 
 1 Most Spanish companies included both women and transvestite boys, and one 
 or the other was prohibited from time to time. Female cross-dressing, however, 
 seems to have been considered a more serious problem than transvestite boys, 
 and was repeatedly banned (e.g., in 1600, 1608, 1615, and 1641), which suggests 
 that the ban must have been repeatedly ignored. The first actresses appeared on 
 Dutch stages in 1655, to predictably outraged clerical opinion. Holland is not a 
 parallel case because it had had no public theater before this time, but the event 
 is suggestive and probably points to contrasting Protestant and Catholic attitudes 
 as well. See Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York, 1987), 408. 
 
 2 G. E. Bentley also notes the 1629 visit of a French company that included actresses. 
 One reporter claims that the troupe was driven from the stage by public outrage 
 at the first and only performance, but the records indicate that this was not the 
 case, and that they performed at least twice more at public theaters in London. 
 See G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1966), 1:25. 
 
 3 I am here summarizing the work of Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of 
 Women (Cambridge, 1980); Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Poli¬ 
 tics of Reproductive Biology,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 4-16: and Stephen 
 Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” in Reconstructing Individualism, ed. Thomas C. 
 Heller et al. (Stanford, 1986). 30-52. 
 
 4 Such an etiology is not unknown in nature. The sex of alligators is determined by 
 the heat at which the eggs are incubated; if it is 90° or over, they are male, if 87° 
 or under, they are female. On the question of whether at 88° or 89° they become 
 androgynes, the authorities are silent. 
 
Nobody’s Perfect 29 
 
 5 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General, ed. W. W. Newbold (New 
 York, 1986), 237. 
 
 6 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981), 92. 
 
 7 Ibid. 
 
 8 Laura Levine, "Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization 
 from 1579 to 1642,” Criticism (Spring 1986): 121-43. In what follows I am in part 
 summarizing Levine’s argument. 
 
 9 John Rainolds, Th'Overthrow of Stage Plays ([Middleburg], 1599), ii, 18. 
 
 10 William Prynne, Histriomastix (London, 1633), 209. 
 
 11 Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (London, 1585), sig. L8v. 
 
 12 Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” 47. 
 
 13 Katharine Mans, “Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender and Spectatorship in En¬ 
 glish Renaissance Drama,” ELH 54 (Fall 1987): 561-62. 
 
 14 After the enactment of the Canons of 1604, parental consent was required for the 
 marriage of children up to the age of twenty-one. 
 
 15 Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (Boston, 1886), 8:77. 
 
 16 Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), 54-55. 
 
 17 Ibid., 77. 
 
 18 Ibid., 75. 
 
 19 To my knowledge, the only instance of political capital being made of King James’s 
 homosexuality is in the scurrilous Corona Regia (1615), almost certainly by the 
 German Catholic satirist Caspar Schoppe (Scoppius), but maliciously credited to 
 James’s supporter Isaac Casaubon and published with a false imprint. This makes 
 much of James’s conferring on his favorites the title of "Magnus Cubicularius tuus" 
 (Knight of your Bedchamber), praises the king for so successfully mixing lust with 
 religion, and compares him with the notorious Heliogabolus. James, outraged, 
 offered a reward for the identification of the author, which was not claimed until 
 1639. I am indebted to Winfried Schleiner for this reference. 
 
 20 Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1906), 69. 
 
 21 Letters of King James VI & I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (Berkeley, 1984), 431. 
 
 22 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial 
 Desire (New York, 1985), 1-48. 
 
 23 The incident is discussed in Roger Lockyer, Buckingham (London, 1981), 101-3. 
 
 24 Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” 51. 
 
< 9 ’ * 
 
 :.«» I'fi/ ' ■ I'r'^S- 
 
 * .iSjlL ' 
 
 1|S '.-M 
 
 .V •"!> ^ ^'^ i n^i^' **^ 
 
 
 
 l^■T,'*^\\:''!'J^? ' f'' <»Ww7Vij^^*'»it‘r|'’,SI ■'■• '■' }'«'iT<(tj. 
 
 M 
 
 •' ij'u 
 
 V iC fr ' . ' 
 
 ftwt.te 'j}' v;,.■ t -irt.'i I iw** 
 
 k>‘iaili ’'^ A •*»’< ,'.'■-ill-W ,At. 
 
 
 
 § 
 
 •^ “ < ^' ■-■ —’y rw 
 
 ,„, /.iV , V. ..■, 
 
 ■> '''’ ■“ ” 
 
 \W.*p'i4r|{v4MCj* V®V^ *‘‘ 
 
 I. t. ^jfc ji'ir'' ^ til 
 
 ' I iVinf'ifin fe l i ffl fit i' > ^ 
 
 tybjjv 5 ifi'/i-^tCi 
 
 '01 %'>\ rji'iri^|A'»4^*V{M|jl<' :fli'^N 
 
 (> •*« t Mu 
 
 '' ' !!’•>■- ‘■'fc: 'l^llii ' ■!••,'’'• 
 
John R. Leo 
 
 The Familialism of “Man” in American 
 Television Melodrama 
 
 I think it is possible to argue that the power of 
 speech should no longer be seen as the primary 
 model for all signification and communication, 
 but as a primitive technology that occupies in the 
 economy of sense-making the sort of position that 
 wood-burning does in the economy of energy. . . . 
 [T]he power of speech is now the electronic media 
 in general and television in particular. Its source 
 is no longer (if it ever was) the individual human 
 subject, but society. It is characterized by . . . the 
 exchange of a “subsistence wage” that is just suf¬ 
 ficient for the sense-making economy to sustain 
 and reproduce itself and its social relations—the 
 “wages” of common sense. 
 
 —^John Hartley' 
 
 By the mid-1980s North American broad¬ 
 cast television—the very instrument of 
 stereotypicality and legitimation, of central¬ 
 ized information and commercialized values 
 —was timidly offering more programming 
 with gay male characters (almost never les¬ 
 bians) or themes, a phenomenon suggesting 
 perhaps less the mainstreaming of homo¬ 
 sexual desire and more its rationalization as 
 
32 John R. Leo 
 
 an entertainment commodity within what Nick Browne has called 
 the “political economy of the television supertext.”^ Television’s 
 strategies of recontainment, which allow “liberal gay discourse”’ rare 
 flow-slices of visibility but not serial amplification, deserve scrutiny 
 as complex operations of power, including how the deployment of 
 representational modes excludes the gay subject and occludes the gay 
 object. At once a theft and an alibi, which would normalize gay rela¬ 
 tions by “uplifting” them into the fantasm of the nuclear family (the 
 shopping unit whose true home is the mall), this televisual mapping is 
 yet another patriarchal commodification of the “masculine.” But even 
 gestures generate (opposing) information in discursive vacuums. It is 
 precisely within the heterogeneity of men’s bodies and lives that we 
 find the “others” who have always been there and are now transmit¬ 
 ted back, like shelf products, in their stripped “generic” forms. 
 
 Following Roland Barthes in S/Z, let’s provisionally say that a 
 stereotype is an achieved transparency, a reduction of classes of peo¬ 
 ple and events to a pure denotation (“the one which seems both to 
 establish and close the reading”).'' The stereotype would think for us; 
 it works as a realism, a conventionalized signification at first glance 
 mirroring or extending directly from an unproblematic referent. It 
 reads social space even while making meanings legible according to 
 the outlines of its predispositions or those of an audience, who plug 
 into its streamlined efficiency in varying ways. The stereotype as¬ 
 sists and constructs perceptions, but even while it works as a device, 
 as a mediation, as a condition of knowledge, it does so invisibly, 
 seemingly “naturally.” As a structure of signs, this apparently simpli¬ 
 fying denotation works as a connotation, one which seems to desig¬ 
 nate persons and groups ahistorically and yet which assimilates new 
 meanings over time. A stereotype works objectively (everything is 
 an object), it works functionally (itself is a function), and it works 
 willy-nilly (it is also desire). For better or worse, this is generally 
 how stereotypicality manages its task of social construction, of infor¬ 
 mation processing. At the very outset, then, we note this static and 
 yet volatile nature of the stereotype, its roots in the representational 
 activity of a society: its illusory status and its persuasive effects, its 
 power of reduction and its inherent instability. 
 
 This understanding of stereotypicality underscores the difficulty 
 
Familialism of "Man” 33 
 
 in conceptualizing gender. My own assumption is “anti-essentialist” 
 (not to be confused with “anti-referential”): that there is not an ir¬ 
 reducible gay essence or core, some originary reference that is some¬ 
 how “out there” on the other side of representation, which in turn 
 can be invoked as the “truly gay,” a master or unequivocal control 
 referent or standard against which the false, the misleading or dis¬ 
 torting stereotype can be measured. Talk about homosexual desire 
 is already political and questions the conditions for (its) knowledge: 
 the procedures, methods, codes, assumptions, and mental sets defin¬ 
 ing and constructing it as a critical object. By the same token, to 
 talk about the gay stereotype requires that we locate how a discourse 
 has situated its representations within the incontrovertible reality 
 and variety of sexual difference, mixed audiences, and conflicting 
 viewing strategies.^ 
 
 Stereotypes collaborate with larger social narratives, specifically 
 discourses whose juridic and authoritative natures also perform po¬ 
 litical and ideological work: discourses we can take to be the insti¬ 
 tutional languages and performatives infused across and within the 
 social formation: sets of explicit and implicit rules authorizing both 
 the positions of speaker and auditor; rules about who or what speaks 
 and listens, and what may or may not be said. These “language 
 games” (after Lyotard) are normative; they validate and embody the 
 status quo and its most cherished realisms. Western versions are con¬ 
 crete manifestations of what Lyotard calls “master narratives,” “Ca¬ 
 nonical Narratives” or “subject systems,” what Foucault constellates 
 as “knowledge/power,” and what Fredric Jameson might call social¬ 
 ized “master codes” or “allegories,” ones conferring legitimacy on or 
 determining the interpretive conditions for social spaces and their 
 organization.* 
 
 With these admittedly large reappropriations of quite divergent 
 conceptions of stereotype and of discourse 1 wish to carry out two 
 intertwined projects. One is to explore the telediscursive conditions 
 for the production and reception of gay meanings for viewers, with 
 particular reference to gay characterization and the melodramatic 
 subtext in the made-for-TV film Consenting Adult (first broadcast on 
 ABC in 1985 and 1987; sold to European TV syndication in 1987). The 
 other is to elaborate, in the words of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, the 
 
34 John R. Leo 
 
 “insight” that meanings “are not only hermetically contained within 
 the ‘endless chatter’ of the circulation of signs . . . which in the 
 absence of either recognition or challenge, by artist [producer] and 
 spectator alike, will inevitably continue to be reproduced.”^ In short, 
 my general goal is to help bring about the conditions for an opposi¬ 
 tional reading of and within the “gay stereotype,” not only to mark 
 its positive but rather to prise its other, its history as a stereotype, 
 already there. By locating muted “heterologies”® within the category 
 of the homosexual, we advance historicist scholarship by publicizing 
 what’s bogus in the category itself and its heterosexist proppings. 
 
 Of course we must talk about several gay stereotypes since these are 
 articulated by dominant discourses and nurtured by popular story¬ 
 telling traditions. The gay subject, for example, has been textualized 
 intensively by theology, jurisprudence, and medicine in the modern 
 period, and it is this discourse proper on homosexual desire, which 
 has separated the homosexual as a type of person (“invert”) from 
 the spectrum of permissible experiences, that gives rise to sexual 
 classifications and their management of the sexual.^ Thus while the 
 discursive tropes helping to structure male interiority were being put 
 into place—notions such as the “oedipal complex,” the equation of 
 all pleasure with heterosexuality if not with parenting, and antipa¬ 
 thy toward any feminization of the masculine—the homosexual was 
 invoked as the vanishing point of allowable male behavior and of rep¬ 
 resentation. This deviancy was talked about and printed about, but 
 as moral failing or case study. To be a homosexual was obscene, to 
 represent one visually was pornographic. 
 
 This privatization—this loss —of sexual experience and even of 
 limited community, and subsequent rigidification of sexual roles, 
 serves the ideological program of familialism, or the mapping (“famil- 
 ializing”) of conservative gender and family hierarchies onto the 
 social formation.To be a sissy, a “nellie” male, or an s/m leather- 
 man, was by definition to be “queer”; no longer of service to the true 
 work of being a middle-class male, to be instead a failed male pro¬ 
 duced by failed parents (the sappy or missing father, the aggressive 
 mother) or by a mutant body (unbalanced hormones). Visual repre- 
 
Familialism of “Man” 35 
 
 sentation tends to the synecdochic (genitalia and mouths define the 
 graffiti) as does the verbal (“gay guys are mouth cunt”). 
 
 If these earlier discourses and traditions, rooted in oral and printed 
 media, historicize the social representation of the American gay 
 male, he has a short history of any sort in mass media which, as Hart¬ 
 ley argues, now replace speech in “the economy of sense-making.” 
 Appearances of gay characters on TV have been sparse until the 1980s 
 and have tended to be confined to just a few genres—mainly melo¬ 
 drama and sitcoms—further typing a character quite unrealized in 
 the first place. It was not until the Stonewall events provided the im¬ 
 petus for the national gay liberation movement that the electronic 
 media took notice of gays in different regions, and then typified their 
 acts and gestures of decolonization as either trends or sixties-styled 
 countercultural groupings. By 1973 this unpredictably widespread 
 movement in turn helped mobilize a coalition of doctors, psycholo¬ 
 gists, and clients which forced the American Psychiatric Association 
 to declassify homosexual desire as an “illness.” This was a crucial 
 tactical step in the post-Stonewall history of gay representation by 
 media, because a (literally) “recuperated” homosexuality—a “dis¬ 
 order,” perhaps, or an “orientation,” but no longer an “illness”—could 
 now, cautiously, become TV life-style material: entertainment. 
 
 Pre-Stonewall representational hints of homosexual difference were 
 on the small screen, but by displacement. Early gay analogues on 
 TV in the 1950s, for example, include the utter artifice of Liberace 
 (“the son every mother wishes for”) and a swishing, camping Milton 
 Berle wearing outlandish hats (a reminder of the pervasiveness of 
 gays and gay references since the nineteenth century in the perfor¬ 
 mance worlds of theater, vaudeville, and burlesque, TV’s immediate 
 ancestors for source material in its crucial early years), or just “fey” 
 routines (Frank Nelson on Jack Benny’s show or as Freddie Filmore on 
 “1 Fove Lucy”)." The figure of sexual difference was reduced to court 
 jestering; (unspoken) homosexuality was not only not serious, it was 
 also not the right stuff. Little from outside TV’s idealized version of 
 the family penetrated sitcoms, one exception being a “sensitive” and 
 well-mannered male dancer on the “Honeymooners,” who raises the 
 red-blooded hackles of Ralph and Norton. Just as gays were imagined 
 to be exterior to the nuclear family, more prodigal exile than aberra- 
 
36 John R. Leo 
 
 tional part, so too were they dismissed from representative space in 
 the media during the 1950s and 1960s, unless one were to count the 
 televised fulminations against gays by McCarthy. It is hard, in this 
 irreal but homophobic teleworld of Ozzie and Harriet, of Beaver and 
 Howdy Doody, of male wrestling and Lucy and Desi, to imagine an 
 established (serial) gay or lesbian character. But as David Marc has 
 shown, during this period the televised family was patently out of it; 
 its crises were all trivia, and its ethical dilemmas on the order of who 
 really broke the window.'^ 
 
 More direct representation of homosexuality on TV occurs in the 
 1970S with occasional treatments on programs such as “All in the 
 Family,” “Maude,” and the notoriously biased CBS Reports, “Gay 
 Power, Gay Politics” (a “documentary” on San Francisco gays filled 
 with errors and used—illegally—for fundraising by the right wing 
 until stopped by CBS). With well-meaning and self-consciously lib¬ 
 eral sitcoms, at least, the viewing impression is that the gay, like the 
 camel, is a horse put together by a committee. When gays are ad¬ 
 mitted into a handful of these second-generation sitcoms the focus is 
 on the adult or parental dilemma (but there are no children around 
 in these episodes). Gays usually provide some comic relief even as 
 they add a “sensitive theme programming” element to the plots. Dis¬ 
 ruption in these shows is comic, resolved always by the formulas of 
 comedy and the prompting of the laugh track.’’ 
 
 Typical in these shows, usually an established series, is the isolated 
 instance of gay-presence-as-disruption, a “problem” the presumably 
 straight regulars can encounter, deal with, and perhaps be liberalized 
 by. The dramatic problem is to represent a properly liberal reaction 
 within the “normality” of social pluralism and consensus and emer¬ 
 gent liberal gay discourse. The “problem” from the perspective of TV 
 offices of standards and practices was how to present or format a 
 gay character in any genre without alluding to his sexuality. In her 
 history of a network’s handling of homosexuality in a made-for-TV 
 film''' in the 1970s while it was consulting, for the first time, with 
 gay organizations in both New York and Los Angeles, Kathryn Mont¬ 
 gomery describes the hierarchy of criteria agreed to for packaging 
 any viewing of homosexual desire on commercial TV: 
 
Familialism of “Man" 37 
 
 [A]ll the decisions affecting the portrayal of gay life were influ¬ 
 enced by the constraints which commercial television as a mass 
 medium imposes upon the creation of its content. The funda¬ 
 mental goal of garnering the largest possible audience necessi¬ 
 tated that (a) the program be placed in a familiar and successful 
 television genre—the crime drama; (b) the story focus upon the 
 heterosexual male lead character and his reactions to the gay 
 characters rather than upon the homosexual characters them¬ 
 selves: and (c) the film avoid any overt display of affection which 
 might be offensive to certain segments of the audience. These 
 requirements served as a filter through which the issue of homo¬ 
 sexuality was processed, resulting in a televised picture of gay 
 life designed to be acceptable to the gay community and still 
 palatable to a mass audience. 
 
 Even as these concessions were being struggled for, Montgomery’s 
 arguments imply that the networks negotiated them not because they 
 were just or equitable. Rather, the broadcasters could avoid certain 
 fights with gays and bad publicity (demonstrations and boycotts) by 
 agreeing to a few programming changes: they thereby could increase 
 their efficiency and optimize their performativity measured as profit. 
 
 It is illuminating in this context to note the taboos still operative 
 within CBS during this same period, when TV was opening itself up 
 to new programs and emphases and yet de-emphasizing sex to pla¬ 
 cate the right wing. Mere outspokenness on “Phyllis,” for example, 
 suffered “in the worsening network atmosphere of mid-yos censor¬ 
 ship with the imposition of the Family Viewing Policy . . . [whose] 
 primary victims were the adult comedies still scheduled before 9:00.” 
 Another observer gives more details, contrasting the earlier situations 
 of give-and-take among the standards and practices people; 
 
 Now, suddenly, day into night. Phyllis has an important line, 
 paying off a story she has told: “Of course, they were gay.” That 
 line has to come out, the network guy says. Offensive. “But don’t 
 you agree the line’s proper in its context?” Oh yes, he agreed. 
 . . . What would not be offensive, he had been authorized to say, 
 would be a hand gesture that implied the word gay.‘^ 
 
38 John R. Leo 
 
 Perhaps the hand gesture here would be a limp wrist. 
 
 Defined network policies of limited representation of gays and the 
 Family Viewing Policy of mere implication share the same assump¬ 
 tion that dramatic focus and resolution are to be reactive to a gay 
 presence, and that gays are not to be solutions to the problem that, 
 indeed, they pose. As John Ellis has shown persuasively, the network 
 reasoning here is based on conceptions of its audience no different 
 from familialism, albeit in its hyper-imaginary commodity form ap¬ 
 propriate to an advertising medium. “TV viewers,” he writes, “are 
 assumed to be seeking diversion, to be watching in domestic sur¬ 
 roundings, to be part of some family grouping. The TV viewer is given 
 a certain position by these assumptions: the viewer is constituted as 
 the normal citizen. . . . Normality is constituted as a constituent 
 of the viewer’s position by the intensive use of the familial and the 
 domestic as point of reference for TV, both in direct address and in 
 fiction; and by the constitution of the opposition ‘inside’/’outside,’ 
 which insulates the viewer from events seen by TV.”'* 
 
 By the 1980s, however, gay sons and siblings are reincorporated 
 inside the bourgeois family order of melodrama, albeit their homo¬ 
 sexuality remains the crisis to be resolved according to the genre’s 
 formulas and codes (as in Consenting Adult, An Early Frost, and Wel¬ 
 come Home, Bobby). Or more exactly: the crisis to be resolved is the 
 nuclear nest’s repugnance and intransigence before an unrelentingly, 
 unrepentantly gay son whose aberration in the post-Stonewall con¬ 
 text is officially no longer a sickness and hence no longer treatable by 
 the rationalism of science and psychiatry, the last great refuge, in a 
 world of shot canonical narratives, for the middle class. Some of the 
 constraints on gay representation described by Montgomery remain 
 in place: he is sexless, an untouchable monad, not a subject within 
 a community. This representational mode, however, is also interdis- 
 cursive: its incorporation of bits and pieces of older representations 
 generates a subtextual level of signification frequently at odds with 
 other dimensions of the storytelling’s planes. 
 
 In the televisual world of narrative realism and sitcom, all is for¬ 
 mula and stereotype in advance, albeit with new permutations and 
 combinations, new denotations and connotations. In the 1980s some 
 overtly gay topics and representations appear infrequently or indi- 
 
Familialism of "Man" 39 
 
 rectly on any network (mini)series, “Dynasty” being more longlast- 
 ing rule than exception with its peek-a-boo handling of Steve Carring¬ 
 ton’s polysexuality. “Soap” was a short-lived critical and popular 
 “recombinant” (or in Marc’s phrase, “self-reflexive”) exception vin¬ 
 dicating itself in cable syndication. “Brothers,” a series built around 
 a family with a gay brother, is Showtime Cable, and “Benny Hill,” 
 like “Barney Miller,” is all farce and disguise from the start.“Hail to 
 the Chief” and “Sara” had their brief play before millions in the 1985 
 season, but like “Brothers” are distinguished for having serial gay 
 characters with full roles. By 1987 gay characters appeared in “seri¬ 
 ous” (nonreductive) roles in episodes from “Barney Miller,” “St. Else¬ 
 where,” “Miami Vice,” “Hotel,” “Trapper John, M.D.,” “L.A. Law,” 
 “Hooperman,” and “The Golden Girls”; several of these programs 
 won awards from the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists in 1987 for 
 their “responsible portrayal of gay and lesbian characters on screen 
 [and] television.”'® Notwithstanding these exceptions, the near-ban- 
 ishment of homosexuality from everyday seriality effectively pre¬ 
 cludes its inclusion within TV normality, that is, from telediscourse 
 and the forms of social familiarity it produces. Gay representation 
 perforce must take the form of a disruption of the norm, which mini¬ 
 mally is white and heterosexist, its presence being a “dilemma,” a 
 disruption of normal interiority, by definition the home, the stable 
 world of middle-class manners and of heterosexual expectations. 
 
 In the past few years several circumstances have combined to change 
 what TV shows and finds profitable. Faltering ratings and alterna¬ 
 tive TV viewing habits have been ushered in by cable and VHS tech¬ 
 nology. The medium’s programming needs, predicated on a principle 
 of built-in obsolescence—styles, chromas, and topics get stale, syn¬ 
 dication circulates older fare as a nostalgia commodity for which 
 ad slots can be sold indefinitely—constantly require new treatments 
 of existing genres, new oblivions and intensities. In industry jar¬ 
 gon, what used to be censored as controversial is now welcomed as 
 sensitive theme programming; programming open to new commodi¬ 
 fied topics, themes, and life-styles (homosexuality, male rape, alco¬ 
 holic husbands, child abuse and incest, anorexia, bag ladies, conflicts 
 
40 John R. Leo 
 
 among the deaf, an atomic bomb dropped on Kansas). Recent TV 
 films (to pass over soaps and talk shows) such as Consenting Adult, 
 Love is Never Silent, Dress Grey, Burning Bed, and The Day After are 
 as symptomatic of discourses such as psychology by which new mar¬ 
 kets with new packages and formats for “experience” (“dysfunctional 
 families”) are cultivated, as they are of telediscourse which programs 
 today’s headlines the better to target specific spending groups and sell 
 them as audiences (“life-styles”) to advertisers. 
 
 Despite these reterritorializations and TV’s efficiency (measurable 
 as profits), it took producer Ray Aghayan nearly ten years to get 
 Laura Z. Hobson’s bestselling novel Consenting Adult —whose con¬ 
 figurations are familiar and familial—to the small screen (ABC, 1985). 
 Robert Galley never did get sufficient backing to adapt a play from 
 the novel.Through a maternal narrative filter Tessa Lynn tells the 
 story of the traumatic fights, standoffs, and final reconciliations of 
 the Lynn family as it came to terms, over a period of years, with the 
 reactions and altered familial positions set in violent motion by the 
 coming out and activist stance of her gay son, Jeff. Even after ABC 
 agreed to do the movie, there were debates over lines and gestures 
 in the script. It was only after the outpouring of public sympathy 
 attending the death of Rock Hudson from AIDS that significant cuts 
 were restored.^ 
 
 Using Hollywood feature and soap editing styles, the melodrama 
 combines discourse and stereotype within the genre of melodrama to 
 put across, in seven segments, not so much Jeff’s story—that would 
 still be too “unpresentable,” too much “advocacy”—but rather his 
 mother’s. The film’s multiple story lines (Jeff’s attempt to reconcile 
 with his parents, his easygoing post-Stonewall compatibility with his 
 sister Margie and brother-in-law Nate; Tess’s conflicts with her hus¬ 
 band Ken, who is impotent and dying from heart disease, and with 
 her daughter, who resents mom’s intrusions into everyone’s lives; 
 Ken’s homophobia) and distribution of expository scenes (fights, out¬ 
 bursts, deferred emotional resolutions), plus the film’s use of parallels 
 and plot inversions, all contribute to competing centers for emotional 
 investment and lines of interpretive decoding. 
 
 Melodrama on American commercial television is invariably built 
 around conflicts within and threats from without to the idealized 
 
Familialism of “Man” 41 
 
 nuclear nest it represents. This imaginary family is at once the stage 
 for its own “naturalness,” a signifier of a taken-for-granted belonging¬ 
 ness within the culture it simulates and validates, and also the locus 
 for its naming of “strangeness,” a signifier for being besieged by alien 
 forces and “dangers.” In Hartley’s sense (citing Barthes), “middle¬ 
 classness” (as distinct from race, youth, women, working class) is 
 precisely that which is “ex-nominated” in representation: it “disap¬ 
 pears” as a signifier and offers “what looks like a settled, positive, 
 natural ‘inside’ for ‘us’ to access as our own selves.”^' 
 
 Consenting Adult and An Early Frost both demonstrate this generic 
 condition. The macronarration for these films transcodes an “out¬ 
 side” danger into an “inside” one: the abominable Other is a sibling- 
 child at home wearing Weejuns. The homogeneous space of the bour¬ 
 geois interior irrupts (from inside) and produces the heterologous: the 
 homo travails with the hetero, the hetero with the homo. When gen¬ 
 der relations are the specificities around which the melodrama must 
 enact its simulations of familial and cultural crisis, the domestication 
 of issues cannot help but read as a revision of discourses—here those 
 sociosexual expectations which are patriarchal, heterosexist, and 
 condemning of homosexual desire. Moreover, the genre’s discursive 
 hierarchies kept in place by the father (he dies in Consenting Adult), 
 traditionally autonomous but relatively integrated at least in their 
 dismissal of homosexuality from the family dinner table, perforce are 
 pitted against each other. Jeff, for example, rejects his psychiatrist’s 
 attempt to “change” him into the image of what his parents wish, 
 but on the basis that “I’m not sick.” Religious discourse is simply not 
 shown (psychiatry is, after all, an easier target for revision), and the 
 juridical is moot. If a genre is a structure of expectations, and we 
 expect acute conflict in a melodrama, then melodramas centered on 
 homosexual desire flirt with the “ruin of representation” or of TV 
 “realism” because they simply do not conform with majority notions 
 of either desire or expectation. No wonder Ken, the angry but finally 
 calm father/husband, dies from heart failure, although he leaves be¬ 
 hind for Jeff a letter whose sentiment he just cannot face giving his 
 son in person: “What father wants a homosexual for a son? ... 1 do. 
 . . . But 1 will not give up my son. You say you had no choice, then 
 neither do 1. ... 1 love you. Dad.” Nevertheless, Jeff’s reconciliation 
 
42 John R. Leo 
 
 with his father is symbolic but not literal; it is a melodramatic excess 
 or fissure indicative of the discursive prohibitions operating within 
 the dramatic. 
 
 As the delegate of liberal gay discourse in Consenting Adult, Jeff is 
 mainly a signifying absence, in keeping with broadcast policy, and 
 his entrances and exits are mainly keyed to keep attention on the par¬ 
 ental anguish his transgression eventuates. His most dramatic scenes 
 are at the boundaries: marking what cannot be shown about him but 
 about which he can speak, or marking his parents’ ignorance and re¬ 
 sentment over which they have confrontations. He and Tess meet for 
 lunch, for example, and while Jeff tells her about his physical attrac¬ 
 tion to men the camera zooms slowly to close-up: “Remember when 
 you met dad? You wanted him. ... 1 try to feel what [men] feel . . . 
 but none of it happens. ... 1 feel alive [when next to my swimmate]. 
 I can’t think of anything else. I dream about him. ... 1 feel the same 
 things for him I’m supposed to feel for girls.” The reverse shot shows 
 an upset and rejected Tess. 
 
 But it is Jeff’s status as a composite stereotype which I want to 
 comment on, for (like Victor Frankenstein’s “Creature”) he is put 
 together from disarticulating bits and pieces of the historical dis¬ 
 course on homosexual desire, which become a narrative pastiche for 
 middle-class “entertainment.” It is simply the precondition for any 
 discussion or representation of the gay subject that he has been medi- 
 calized and juridicalized against a background of the modern cele¬ 
 bration of heterosexuality. If this were not the case, homosexuality 
 would hardly be the stuff of TV melodrama. Jeff’s psychiatrist, who 
 in the film claims a “ 25 % cure rate,” is the figure for homosexuality 
 as a disease and for scientism (and implicitly rationalism) as the 
 repository for dreams of therapy and progress. He is the rejected sur¬ 
 rogate of Krafft-Ebing, Ulrichs, Freud, and others from nineteenth- 
 and twentieth-century science who would naturalize social relations 
 and displace them into the disciplines of psychiatry, biology, and 
 so on. 
 
 Jeff is shown as loving and caring of his father, who rejects him 
 and not vice versa, a representation at odds with the popular no¬ 
 tion that gay men are oedipal wrecks who hate their fathers. On the 
 other hand, Ken is ill and dies, so he is thematized discursively as the 
 
Familialism of “Man" 43 
 
 “weak father.” Jeff is closer emotionally with Tess, corresponds and 
 meets with her secretly, a script formula whose discursive oedipal 
 subtext reads that he is “close” to his “strong,” “pushy,” and “aggres¬ 
 sive” mother. Jeff is a scholar-athlete, however, whose post-Stonewall 
 “new masculinity” questions the sissy or nelly homosexual paradigm 
 especially popular and tenacious since the lumping together of “deca¬ 
 dents” of all sorts (the flaneur, dandy, artist) after about 1875 and 
 whose symbolic concretization is Oscar Wilde. His college room¬ 
 mate throws him out after discovering Jeff is gay, but Jeff finds a 
 lover in medical school. Jeff is “out”: at first isolated and fearful, he 
 can later tell people in a restaurant he is a “fag.” Moreover, he has 
 close friendships with women, and remains close with his brother-in- 
 law and sister, a staging surely of babyboomer mainstreamed mascu¬ 
 linity and other values suggesting the continuing erosion of rigid gen¬ 
 der roles. Thus: Jeff is labeled, stigmatized, colonized, medicalized, 
 blackmailed emotionally by his family to undergo therapy, rejected, 
 hurt; his animality and sexuality are regulated (ostracized as “un¬ 
 presentable”). He is also reincorporated, as the rebel body returned, 
 back into the bourgeois family and its attendant obligations of fealty, 
 kinship, and property.” 
 
 This is the form of Consenting Adult’s subtext: in Jameson’s sense, 
 the “story” which the film has tried to manage. At the same time, 
 when we realize the role played in the dissemination of these nar¬ 
 rative tropes we can more fully appreciate the roles of storytelling 
 and social bonding in the organization of desire of real social sub¬ 
 jects, and especially the role of the family. Jeff’s characterization as 
 young man who comes out/into his own homosexual desire is a sort 
 of palimpsest (Jameson’s example of allegorical writing and rewrit¬ 
 ing); it is at once the locus of multiple historical possibilities and 
 of Foucauldian “power/knowledge,” the emergence of “subjugated 
 knowledges” or “resurrected languages” over against the patriarchal 
 inscriptions on the gay body. These narrative layerings function as 
 instances of the power of stories to undo their own organization, to 
 offer, in other words, the basis for a genuine historical and opposi¬ 
 tional reading of the film, and by extension the basis of a delegiti- 
 mizing reading of hegemonic discourses. 
 
 Is this it for a gay viewer? we ask. Well, not quite. I want to suggest 
 
44 John R. Leo 
 
 another reading of the idealized family of Consenting Adult, letting 
 it be the metonym for the unselfconscious world of the middle-class 
 melodrama and at the same time letting it stand for a difference in 
 how some gays might view the imaginary of familialism. 
 
 The Lynn family is (after Jameson) a “fantasm” and also capital’s 
 ideological “axiomatic” of what the family would be: it is both dream 
 and dreamworld and yet just empirical enough to represent actual 
 possibility.” Remember the idealized family of the TV representation: 
 a working father, a housewife, two children with the older daughter 
 married and comfortable, a quite roomy upscale home in suburban 
 Seattle (although the film was shot on location in Vancouver, B.C.) 
 with terraced yard. Jeff, a star athlete at the University of Washing¬ 
 ton, is financially dependent on his father for tuition and expenses. 
 When Jeff and Ken have their climactic fight, with the son asserting 
 his right to love another man as a “consenting adult,” Ken’s harsh 
 reply is: “I’m educating you . . . paying for your psychiatrist . . . 
 [you’re] not getting another penny!” Jeff walks out, to return for his 
 (chastened) father’s funeral. Even Tess’s rejection yields to her love 
 for her son. Seemingly, this is a family that has everything, includ¬ 
 ing the power to heal itself. No matter what winds and waves storm 
 against it, such as Ken’s illness and untimely death from heart disease 
 and the nearly catastrophic discovery that homosexuality is inside 
 it, this family is all-powerful and overcoming. This is the simulated 
 family, as Ellis has it, of viewer “expectation” (generic repetition) 
 and/or “desire” (fantasy, libidinal investment).” Or is it? 
 
 Freely adapting Jameson’s remarks on Balzac, the “metonymic and 
 connotative registers” of melodramatic “realism” release (construct) 
 an “object of desire,” one assumed as much as it is invoked by the 
 melodramatic texts and their tradition of idealized home life, in 
 this instance a genealogical descent from TV’s Ozzie-and-Harriet 
 family matrix and one clearly associated with disposable income. 
 The viewer’s “consent” must be secured “before the narrative process 
 can function properly,” which is to say that the text may offer “a 
 plausible desire that we do not ourselves share.”” Ken’s financial and 
 emotional cutting off of his son opens up a gap for not only a gay 
 but an antipatriarchal oppositional viewing of this film, one which 
 identifies and resists the specificity of a father’s world held together 
 
Familialism of “Man" 45 
 
 by rigid gender roles as the price for consumption, and poverty/ex¬ 
 pulsion/castration as the penalty for disobedience. 
 
 The gap opens further because the melodrama sets in motion an¬ 
 other equally desirable goal—that of family unity and reconciliation 
 within structures of difference—which is what the motivating quest 
 of the drama is all about. The narrative apparatus for this film, then, 
 depends on the desirability of two incommensurate goals or objects 
 “mythologically” rendered compatible only by the father’s death, an 
 incommensurability which can be transcoded as the “turn” of the 
 postmodern against the modern within the family itself. The master 
 narratives essential to familialism are trashed. 
 
 Let me put it this way: in a more traditional narrative structure of 
 a rebellious son whose paradigm would be the myth of the Prodigal 
 Son and not Oedipus, the father’s approval and the son’s economic 
 and sexual self-determination are always in potential or actual con¬ 
 flict, until the son seeks forgiveness or (in other narrative subsets) 
 overcomes paternal alienation by marriage. In Consenting Adult, the 
 counterinsurgency of same-gender sex and hlial rejection of patri¬ 
 mony and economic tyranny is a double assault on the high altar 
 of patriarchy and its say on gender relations and dispositions: this 
 (corporeal) “unpresentable” is glossed over by the double agency of 
 a mother’s love and the son’s reincorporation of his body back into 
 healing (he will be a physician) and the middle class. 
 
 A consummate irony: this telediscursive son who rejected psy¬ 
 chiatry, who refused the “soft terror” of control and normalization 
 by medicine, turns his “madness” and immorality into electronic 
 speech. Thus the utopian projection released by this partial con¬ 
 glomeration of gay stereotypes rebounds as a critique of the social. 
 The TV family of melodrama gives a fantasized objectivity to social 
 problems, and viewers experience themselves and social problems by 
 consuming them in this spectacular form. However, glimpses of other 
 sexualities and communities may be caught in these histories of pop 
 representations, prompting us “to learn to desire differently.”^* 
 
 Several things are manifestly clear from these examples on what and 
 how the TV stereotype is constituted and received. One is that what 
 
46 John R. Leo 
 
 goes into the making of a stereotype is not necessarily what is con¬ 
 sumed. Another is that the model of the communication process one 
 uses for the analysis of the stereotype has its own operating assump¬ 
 tions. It is also clear that in cultural dynamics and communications, 
 encoding and decoding activities are asymmetrical operations in the 
 production of meanings.^^ 
 
 Dominant or preferred interpretations at one encoding level, how¬ 
 ever, may be opposed or undermined by variant encodings at another 
 narrative level and by diffused receptions. The history of film, for 
 example, shows us that gay men a generation ago identified with 
 “strong” female film noir stars such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, 
 who were tough fighters and sexually free agents up against tough 
 odds (including their “bad girl” reputations and cynical piety), just as 
 today all sorts of men watch “Dynasty” ’s Alexis through camp eyes. 
 Stereotypes, as part of an informational flow with shifting narrative 
 functions, thereby assist in destabilizing what appears most perma¬ 
 nent in the social order: distinctions between the sexes, or between 
 “good” and “evil.” One could argue, to take another example, that 
 the lawyer dying from AIDS in An Early Frost (NBC) is stereotypical 
 in the sense that he fits into an old pattern: the gay hero is symboli¬ 
 cally punished and killed, although in this movie his death is forecast, 
 not shown. (Vito Russo and others use this argument in putting down 
 No Way Out, a thriller with a gay villain who also kills himself.) My 
 point is, however, that the dying lawyer’s stereotype is determined by 
 its structural position in the melodrama. As a queer or fag this man 
 is an object of scorn and fear, but as a son and successful lawyer he 
 is invested with sympathy because he reproduces middle-class pro¬ 
 fessional desires. It is a truism that the networks do not “advocate” 
 homosexuality, yet they do advocate tearjerkers. Cultural contempt 
 is modified by the culture’s own ideological investment in familial- 
 ism. One of the unintended effects of An Early Frost is to narrate how 
 the family is itself an ideological construct which in turn reproduces 
 discursive conflicts to the point of agonized contradiction. 
 
 It is this flux in the communication process that undermines, 
 restages, and redefines an always shifting discursive “common sense,” 
 according to Hartley, whose point of view echoes Lyotard’s argu¬ 
 ments on the collapse of the “master narratives” (Christianity, Marx- 
 
Familialism of “Man” 47 
 
 ism, capitalism). “Narratives,” Lyotard argues in The Postmodern Con¬ 
 dition, are not only “master” in the sense of discursively dominant 
 (although ruined and “collapsed” because they are (a) increasingly 
 dispersed, incredible, and inapplicable and (b) therefore no longer 
 socially “efficient” and magisterially determinant): narratives are 
 also “micronarratives” which use information differently and to ends 
 other than those of the decision-makers and managers of the post¬ 
 modern society of information manipulation. He writes: 
 
 In a sense the people are only that which actualizes the nar¬ 
 ratives: once again, they do this not only by recounting them, 
 but also by listening to them and recounting themselves through 
 them: in other words, by putting them into “play” in their in¬ 
 stitutions. . . . Narratives . . . determine criteria of competence 
 and/or illustrate how they are to be applied. They thus define 
 what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, 
 and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are 
 legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do.^** 
 
 In Lyotard’s usage, which I am oversimplifying here, a stereotype 
 would be a sort of abstracted embodiment of a “language game,” 
 a “phrase linkage” or “rule,” one floating about institutions and 
 (always regrouping) discourses, connecting them and operating their 
 power. In this view a stereotype would be useful to the extent that 
 it optimized an institution’s performativity (profits) by achieving 
 the aims of a specific narrative (positioning individuals within the 
 social character roles allocated by a particular story or plot). For the 
 same reason a stereotype could be changed, recombined with others, 
 or otherwise made commensurable (useful, visible) as information. 
 Gays, minorities of all sorts, and WASPs all constitute “clouds 
 of sociality” (“language clouds”) which are managed by decision¬ 
 makers “according to input/output matrices, following a logic which 
 implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole 
 is determinable.” A possible end to which stereotypes are put, then, 
 is the “organic” (“melting pot”) view of society, one supporting a 
 rationalist view of the socioeconomic system as inherently “centrist” 
 and “centralized,” in Ellis’s useful terms. 
 
 Managers, Lyotard continues, “allocate our lives for the growth of 
 
48 John R. Leo 
 
 power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the 
 legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system’s per¬ 
 formance—efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our 
 games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or 
 hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.”^’ The 
 extent to which a narrative function, including the stereotype, is 
 commensurable (that it carry out the assigned task of realism: “to 
 preserve various consciousnesses from doubt,” or give them “nostal¬ 
 gia” or aesthetic “suffering”), means that it is socially efficient in the 
 derealized world of late capitalism. “Realism” is now problematized, 
 and with it any notion of stereotypical representation: 
 
 Industrial photography and cinema will be superior to painting 
 and the novel whenever the objective is to stabilize the referent, 
 to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with 
 a recognizable meaning, to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary 
 which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences 
 quickly, and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own 
 identity as well as the approval which he thereby receives from 
 others—since such structures of images and sequences consti¬ 
 tute a communication code among all of them. This is the way 
 the effects of reality, or if one prefers, the fantasies of realism, 
 multiply.^® 
 
 To “stabilize the referent” means that a major function of cul¬ 
 tural artifacts, including TV representation, is to repeat efficiently, 
 quickly, and easily a point of view with “recognizable meaning,” 
 a homogeneity culturally produced and sustained which devalues 
 difference. Or, if difference is to be reincorporated (made commen¬ 
 surable, mainstreamed) into the body politic, it is to be repeatedly 
 narrated along new story lines building on shared “communication 
 codes”: the very business of TV. The “effects of reality” are indis¬ 
 tinguishable from the (televised) “fantasies of realism,” which, as 
 Lyotard goes on to demonstrate, are functionally the “mixing” and re¬ 
 combining of story elements, images, and hints of an avant-garde (the 
 unpresentable) into a pulsing, changing pastiche. This is the post¬ 
 modern condition: pastiche, mishmash, a citation here and another 
 
Familialism of “Man” 49 
 
 there always in segments, TV’s final commodity form, an endless 
 production of reproduction for optimum profit. 
 
 Perhaps what we need is an acceleration of citations and pastiches, 
 an overdetermination of TV “realisms” and stereotypes so as to in¬ 
 undate an unsuspecting body politic already awash with “entertain¬ 
 ment” to the point of being swamped; perhaps we need to broadcast 
 made-for-TV Bataille, Nietzsche, Kathy Acker, at least Taxi zum KIo 
 (as was done during prime time by NOS Dutch Television in the 
 spring of 1986).’’ The oppositional postmodern gesture would be to 
 push language games to their limits, to partake of the duplicity of 
 an exhausted “tasteful” (reactionary, modernist) intention in order 
 to bring the unpresentable a little closer—to celebrate the commodi¬ 
 fication of the gay man as a middle-class hero of consumption—for 
 the purpose of disarticulating not only the logic of modernity’s con¬ 
 straints but also their power. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 John Hartley. “Encouraging Signs: Television and the Power of Dirt. Speech, and 
 Scandalous Categories.” in Interpreting Television: Current Research Perspectives, 
 ed. Willard D. Rowland. Jr., and Bruce Watkins (Beverly Hills. 1984). 138. 
 
 2 Nick Browne. “The Political Economy of the Television Supertext.” Quarterly Re¬ 
 view of Film Studies 9 (Summer 1984); 174-82: see Larry Gross. “The Cultivation 
 of Intolerance; Television. Blacks, and Gays.” in Cultural Indicators: An Interna¬ 
 tional Symposium, ed. Gabriele Melischek et al. (V'ienna. 1984). 345-63. and his 
 “Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media.” in Rethinking 
 the Audience, ed. Hans Borchers and Ellen Seiter (London, forthcoming). 
 
 3 Mark Finch. “Sex and Address in Dynasty," Screen 27 (November-December 1986); 
 24-42. 
 
 4 Roland Barthes. S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York. 1974). 8-9. 
 
 5 Richard Dyer. “Stereotyping.” in Gays and Film, ed. Richard Dyer (New York. 
 1984). 27-39: Andy Medhurst. “‘Victim’: Text as Context.” Screen 25 (July-Octo- 
 ber 1984): 22-35: and Frank Lentricchia. “Patriarchy Against Itself—The Young 
 Manhood of Wallace Stevens.” Critical Inquiry 13 (Summer 1987): 742-86. 
 
 6 Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. 
 Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis. 1984): Michel Foucault. 
 “Powers and Strategies.” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings, 1972-1977, trans. 
 Colin Gordon et al.. ed. Colin Gordon (New York. 1980): Fredric Jameson. The 
 Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca. 1981). 
 
50 John R. Leo 
 
 7 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Beyond the Simulation Principle,” in Utopia Post Uto¬ 
 pia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography, 
 Exhibition Catalogue at the Institute for Contemporary Art (Boston. 1988), 97. 
 
 8 Michel de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” in Heterologies: Discourse on 
 the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1986), 199-221. See also Gad Horo¬ 
 witz and Michael Kaufman, “Male Sexuality: Toward a Theory of Liberation,” in 
 Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change, ed. Michael 
 Kaufman (Toronto, 1987), 103-17. 
 
 9 See two works by Jeffrey Weeks: Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from 
 the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977). and “Discourse, Desire 
 and Sexual Deviance: Some Problems in a History of Homosexuality,” in The 
 Making of the Modern Homosexual, ed. Kenneth Plummer (London, 1981). See also 
 Gary Kinsman, “Men Loving Men: The Challenge of Gay Liberation,” in Kaufman, 
 ed.. Beyond Patriarchy, 103-17: and Don Mager, “Gay Theories of Gender Role 
 Deviance,” SubStance 46 (1985): 32-48. 
 
 10 Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London, 1982), dis¬ 
 cussed by Serafina Bathrick, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Women at Home and 
 at Work,” in MTM: '“Quality" Television, ed. Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise 
 Vahimagi (London, 1984), 99-100. See also Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Fami¬ 
 lies (New York, 1979). 
 
 11 On gays and theater see Kaier Curtin, We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians (Bos¬ 
 ton, 1987); and on “fey” TV, Richard Laermer, “The Televised Gay: How We're 
 Pictured on the Tube,” The Advocate, 5 February 1985, 20-21, 23-25. 
 
 12 David Marc. Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture (Philadelphia, 
 
 1984) . 
 
 13 See Paul Attallah, “The LFnworthy Discourse: Situation Comedy in Television,” in 
 Rowland and Watkins, eds.. Interpreting Television, 222-49. 
 
 14 Kathryn Montgomery, “Gay Activists and the Networks,” 7 ourna/ of Communica¬ 
 tion 31 (Summer 1981): 49-57; and Braddlee and Michael Killoren, “In the Matter 
 of Pacifica: Free Speech and Governmental Regulation” (Paper presented at the 
 American Culture Association. New Orleans, March 1988). 
 
 15 “MTM Productions: A Guide,” in Feuer, Kerr, and Vahimagi, eds., MTM: "Quality" 
 Television, 214. 
 
 16 John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London, 1982), 169. 
 
 17 Attallah, “Unworthy Discourse,” 239. 
 
 18 Deborah Caulfield, “Gay Alliance Awards: E for Effort, Emotion,” Los Angeles 
 Times, 23 March 1987, sec. 4. 
 
 19 Laura Z. Hobson, Laura Z; A Life (New York, 1986), 281-309. 
 
 20 Adam Block, “ ‘An Early Frost’: The Story Behind NBC’s AIDS Drama,” The Advo¬ 
 cate, 26 November 1985, 43-47. 
 
 21 Hartley, “Encouraging Signs,” 129. 
 
 22 Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (New York, 
 
 1985) . 
 
Familialism of “Man" 51 
 
 23 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 153-57. 180-82. 
 
 24 Ellis, Visible Fictions, 6-7. 
 
 25 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 156. 
 
 26 Colin Mercer, “A Poverty of Desire; Pleasure and Popular Politics,” in Formations 
 of Pleasure, Formations Editorial Collective (London, 1983). 100. 
 
 27 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979): and two essays 
 by Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media 
 Studies," in Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch et al. (London, 
 1982), 56-90; and “Encoding/Decoding.” in Culture, Media, Language: Working 
 Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London. 1980). 128-38. 
 
 28 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 23. 
 
 29 Ibid., xxiv. 
 
 30 Ibid., 74. 
 
 31 John R. Leo, “Postmodernity, Narrative. Sexual Politics: Reflections on Jean-Fran- 
 ^ois Lyotard,” forthcoming in Centennial Review. 
 

 
 KV 
 
 
 r, 
 
 jb 
 
 
 » t 
 
 pj-' 
 
 ■' ••'il’ i(a I i 
 
 - # . .. .' • I • -■■■* 
 
 . :A'*irtl' K' 
 
 „: ,♦ i-At-.r,' . » '■■■■ ■* -I 
 
 ■--**, '• I'l* » I ' '* I'- - (m 
 
 . -> ' ■. - ' ■• f ' ■ ^ ■' ^ '■■ J'.- 
 
 |W 'fkl( Ji ... IliA ' >»> ‘.i''i''.rit[fl 
 
 , *• ■•* • I .w/tH'^Vu'nvr*.'*308131 • 
 
 i 4 * *i— 
 
 *» • jAiii 
 
 t'‘ < % k- -* 
 
 > *“ V """ 
 
 ' ' ■' 
 
 .Pj ^ t4«iii 
 
 1 ^ 
 
 3 
 
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 Across Gender, Across Sexuality: 
 Willa Gather and Others 
 
 I want to challenge the assumption that feminism 
 is or should be the privileged site of a theory of 
 sexuality. Feminism is the theory of gender op¬ 
 pression. . . . Gender affects the operation of the 
 sexual system, and the sexual system has had gen¬ 
 der-specific manifestations. But although sex and 
 gender are related, they are not the same thing. 
 
 —Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex” 
 
 Let’s hypothesize, with Gayle Rubin, that 
 the question of gender and the question 
 of sexuality, inextricable from each other 
 though they are in that each can be expressed 
 only in the terms of the other, are nonethe¬ 
 less not the same question, that gender and 
 sexuality represent two analytic axes that 
 may productively be imagined as being as 
 distinct from each other as, say, gender and 
 class, or class and race.' Under this hypothe¬ 
 sis, just as we’ve learned to assume that no 
 issue of racial meaning fails to be embodied 
 through the specificity of a particular class 
 position—and no issue of class, for instance, 
 through the specificity of a particular gender 
 
54 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 position—so we can assume that no issue of gender would fail to be 
 embodied through the specificity of a particular sexuality, and vice 
 versa; nonetheless, there could be use in keeping the analytic axes 
 distinct. 
 
 Next, let’s hypothesize that gay/lesbian and antihomophobic in¬ 
 quiry still has a lot to learn from asking the questions that feminist 
 inquiry has learned to ask—but only so long as we don’t demand to 
 receive the same answers. Comparing feminist and gay theory as they 
 currently stand, the newness and consequent relative underdevelop¬ 
 ment of gay theory are most visible in two manifestations. First, we 
 are by now very used to asking as feminists what we aren’t yet used 
 to asking as antihomophobic readers: how a variety of forms of op¬ 
 pression intertwine systemically with each other, and especially how 
 the person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may by the 
 same positioning be enabled through others. For instance, the under¬ 
 stated demeanor of educated women in our society tends to mark 
 both their deference to educated men and their expectation of defer¬ 
 ence from women and men of lower class. Again, a woman’s use of 
 a married name makes graphic her subordination as a woman and at 
 the same time her privilege as a presumptive heterosexual. Or again, 
 the distinctive vulnerability to rape of women of all races has be¬ 
 come in this country a powerful tool for the racist enforcement by 
 which white people, including women, are privileged at the expense 
 of black people of both genders. That one is either oppressed or an 
 oppressor, on the other hand, or, if one happens to be both, that the 
 two are not likely to have much to do with each other, still seems to 
 be a common assumption in at least male gay writing and activism, 
 as it hasn’t for a long time been in careful feminist work. 
 
 Indeed, it was the long, painful realization, not that all oppres¬ 
 sions are congruent, but that they are differently structured and so 
 must intersect in complex embodiments, that has been the first great 
 heuristic breakthrough of feminist thought. This realization has as 
 its corollary that the comparison of different axes of oppression is a 
 crucial task, not for any purpose of ranking oppressions, but to the 
 contrary because each oppression is likely to be in a uniquely indica¬ 
 tive relation to certain distinctive nodes of cultural organization. The 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 55 
 
 special centrality of homophobic oppression in the twentieth century 
 has been in its inextricability from the question of knowledge and the 
 processes of knowing in modern Western culture at large. 
 
 The second and perhaps even greater heuristic leap of feminism 
 has been the recognition that categories of gender—and hence op¬ 
 pressions of gender—can have a structuring force for axes of cultural 
 discrimination whose thematic subject isn’t explicitly gendered at 
 all. We have now learned as feminist readers that dichotomies in a 
 given text—of culture as opposed to nature, for instance, public as 
 opposed to private, mind as opposed to body, activity as opposed 
 to passivity—are, under particular pressures of culture and history, 
 likely places to look for implicit allegories of the relations of men 
 to women: more, that to fail to analyze such nominally ungendered 
 constructs in gender terms can itself be a gravely tendentious move 
 in the gender politics of reading. This has given us ways to ask the 
 question of gender about texts even where the culturally “marked” 
 gender (female) is not present as either author or thematic. Coming 
 of age at the same time as and in a synergistic relation to decon¬ 
 struction, much feminist reading is moreover richly involved with the 
 deconstructive understanding that categories presented in a culture 
 as symmetrical binary oppositions—male/female, as well as culture/ 
 nature, etc.—actually subsist in a more unsettling and dynamic tacit 
 relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but 
 subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term 
 A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption 
 and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority be¬ 
 tween the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of 
 each dyad is irresolvably unstable. 
 
 The dichotomy heterosexual/homosexual, as it has emerged 
 through the last century of Western discourse, would seem to lend 
 itself peculiarly neatly to a set of analytic moves learned from this 
 deconstructive moment in feminist theory. One has perhaps only to 
 remind oneself that the “deviant” category “homosexual” antedates 
 the supposedly normative “heterosexual”: conceptually by something 
 over a decade, and lexically, in American English, by at least two 
 years.^ In fact, heterosexual/homosexual fits the deconstructive tern- 
 
56 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 plate much more neatly than the dichotomy male/female does, and 
 hence, importantly differently. The most dramatic difference between 
 gender and sexual orientation—that virtually all people are pub¬ 
 licly and unalterably assigned to one or the other gender, and from 
 birth—seems if anything to mean that it is rather sexual orienta¬ 
 tion, with its far greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and 
 representational doubleness, that would offer the more apt decon- 
 structive object. An essentialism of sexual object choice is far less 
 easy to maintain, far more visibly incoherent, more visibly stressed 
 and challenged at every point in the culture, than any essentialism of 
 gender. Indeed the unbudging conceptual deadlock over the last hun¬ 
 dred years between minoritizing views of homosexuality as the fixed 
 trait of a distinct small percentage of the population, and universal¬ 
 izing views of it as a widely diffused potential in whole populations 
 whom only its pointed repression renders heterosexual, answers the 
 deconstructive analysis of the instability of binary oppositions with a 
 congruence that may prove telling on both sides. And our developing 
 understanding of the centrality of homosocial bonds to patriarchal 
 heterosexist culture suggests ways of extending such an analysis from 
 the individual to the systemic level. 
 
 A definitional and methodological caution concerning the relation 
 of my current subject, gay/lesbian and antihomophobic theory, to 
 the project alluded to by Gayle Rubin in the sentences I’ve used as 
 an epigraph, a theory of sexuality. The two can after all scarcely be 
 coextensive. And this is true not because “gay/lesbian and antihomo¬ 
 phobic theory” would fail to cover heterosexual as well as same- 
 sex object choice (any more than “feminist theory” would fail to 
 cover men as well as women), but rather because sexuality extends 
 along so many dimensions that aren’t well-described in terms of the 
 gender of object choice at all. Some of these dimensions are habitu¬ 
 ally condensed under the rubrics of object choice, so that certain 
 discriminations of (for instance) act, or of (for another instance) 
 erotic localization, come into play however implicitly and however 
 incoherently when categories of object choice are mobilized. For 
 example, one used to hear a lot about a high developmental stage 
 called “heterosexual genitality”; or again, a certain anal-erotic sa¬ 
 lience of male homosexuality is if anything increasingly strong under 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 57 
 
 the glare of heterosexist AlDS-phobia; while several different his¬ 
 torical influences have led to the degenitalization and bodily diffu¬ 
 sion of many popular, and indeed many lesbian, understandings of 
 lesbian sexuality. Other dimensions of sexuality, however, distin¬ 
 guish object choice quite differently (for example, human/animal, 
 adult/child, singular/plural, autoerotic/alloerotic) or are not even 
 about object choice (e.g., orgasmic/nonorgasmic, noncommercial/ 
 commercial, using bodies only/using manufactured objects, in pri¬ 
 vate/in public, spontaneous/scripted). Some of these other dimen¬ 
 sions of sexuality have had high diacritical importance in differ¬ 
 ent historical contexts (e.g., human/animal, autoerotic/alloerotic). 
 Others, like adult/child object choice, visibly do have such impor¬ 
 tance today, but without being very fully subsumed under the homo/ 
 heterosexual binary. Still others, including a host of them I haven’t 
 mentioned or couldn’t think of, subsist in this culture as nondiacriti- 
 cal differences, differences that seem to make little difference beyond 
 themselves—except that the hyperintensive structuring of sexuality 
 in our culture sets several of them at the exact border between legal 
 and illegal. What I mean, at any rate, to emphasize is that the im¬ 
 plicit condensation of “sexual theory” into “gay/lesbian and anti¬ 
 homophobic theory,” which corresponds roughly to our by now un¬ 
 questioned reading of the ubiquitous “sexual orientation” to mean 
 “gender of object choice,” is at the very least damagingly skewed by 
 its present historical placement. 
 
 Even insofar as the question of sexuality can be condensed as the 
 question of homo/heterosexuality, however, its conceptualization is 
 anything but simple. In recent work, 1 have been arguing that our cul¬ 
 ture’s crystallization of gay identities over the past hundred years has 
 persistently been structured by two conceptual impasses or incoher¬ 
 ences, one concerning gender definition and the other concerning 
 sexual definition. 
 
58 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 Separatist 
 
 Integrative 
 
 Homo/hetero 
 sexual definition 
 
 Minoritizing, e.g., 
 gay identity, “essen- 
 tialist,” third-sex 
 models, civil rights 
 models 
 
 Universalizing, e.g., 
 bisexual potential, 
 “social construc¬ 
 
 tionist,” “sodomy” 
 models, “lesbian 
 
 continuum” 
 
 Gender definition Gender separatist. 
 
 Inversion! limi- 
 nali tyi transi ti vi ty, 
 e.g., cross-sex, 
 androgyny, gay/ 
 lesbian solidarity 
 models 
 
 e.g., homosocial 
 continuum, les¬ 
 bian separatist. 
 
 manhood-initiation 
 
 models 
 
 With regard to gender, two quite opposite possibilities for defining 
 the person who desires someone of their own gender have prevailed, 
 often at the same time. One of these, the gender-integrative pos¬ 
 sibility manifest in the turn-of-the-century topos of inversion (“a 
 woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body” or vice versa), but longer- 
 lived in homophobic folklore and “common sense,” in certain in¬ 
 fluential formulations of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and also in 
 many vibrant aspects of current gay and lesbian culture, points to 
 an essential femininity in gay men and/or an essential masculinity in 
 lesbians. While this topos of inversion or liminality places gay people 
 exactly at the threshold between genders, its persistence has been 
 yoked, at the same time, to that of its contradictory counterpart, the 
 topos of gender separatism. Under this latter view, far from its being 
 of the essence of desire (including same-sex desire) to cross bounda¬ 
 ries of gender, it is instead the most natural thing in the world that 
 people of the same gender, people grouped together under the single 
 most determinative diacritical mark of social organization, people 
 whose social needs and knowledges may have so much in common, 
 should band together also on the axis of sexual desire. As the gender- 
 separatist substitution of the concept “woman-identified woman” for 
 the gender-liminal stereotype of the mannish lesbian suggests, as in¬ 
 deed does the concept of the continuum of male or female homosocial 
 desire, this topos tends to reassimilate identification with desire. In- 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 59 
 
 version models, by contrast, depend conceptually on the distinctness 
 of identification from desire. Gender separatist models would thus 
 place the woman-loving woman and the man-loving man each at 
 the “natural” defining center of their own gender, rather than, as 
 gender-integrative models would, at the threshold between genders. 
 The immanence of each of these models in the history of gay theory is 
 clear from the early split in the German homosexual rights movement 
 between Magnus Hirschfeld, who posited, in Donald Mager’s para¬ 
 phrase, “an exact equation . . . between cross-gender behaviors and 
 homosexual desire.” and Benedict Friedlander, who concluded to the 
 contrary “that homosexuality was the highest, most perfect evolu¬ 
 tionary stage of gender differentiation. Men who needed women were 
 seen as less manly than those who could transcend the procreational 
 imperative in favor of this higher ‘masculinity.’ 
 
 Along with the incoherence about gender definition, a deadlock or 
 incoherence of definition prevails, as well, between separatist and in¬ 
 tegrative conceptualizations of homo/heterosexua/ definition. Over 
 the span of a century, definitions of homosexuality as a universal 
 human potential have conflicted with definitions of it as the trait 
 of a distinct and fixed minority. The most current form in which 
 this conflict is visible is in the debate between “social construction¬ 
 ist” and “essentialist” understandings of homo/heterosexual identity. 
 The conflict has a long history, however. Historical narratives since 
 Foucault have seemed to show universalizing paradigms, such as the 
 proscription of particular acts called “sodomy” (acts that might be 
 performed by anybody), as being displaced after the late nineteenth 
 century by the definition of particular kinds of persons, specifically 
 “homosexuals.” But the truth seems to be that since the late nine¬ 
 teenth century the two understandings, contradictory though they 
 are, have coexisted, creating in the space of their contradiction enor¬ 
 mous potentials of discursive power. We have just at the moment 
 of this writing (March 1988) a perfect example of this potent inco¬ 
 herence in the anomalous legal situation of gay people and acts in 
 this country: while the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick has 
 notoriously left the individual states free to prohibit any acts that 
 they wish to define as “sodomy,” by whomsoever performed, with 
 no fear at all of impinging on any rights, and particularly privacy 
 rights, safeguarded by the Constitution—at the same time a panel 
 
60 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month (in Sergeant 
 Perry J. Watkins v. United States Army) that homosexual persons, as 
 a particular kind of person, are entitled to Constitutional protections 
 under the Equal Protection clause. To be gay in this system is to come 
 under the radically overlapping aegises of a universalizing discourse 
 of acts and at the same time of a minoritizing discourse of persons. 
 Just at the moment, at least in the institutions of law, the former 
 aegis prohibits what the latter protects. But in the concurrent public 
 health constructions around AIDS, for instance, it is far from clear 
 that a minoritizing discourse of persons (“risk groups”) is not even 
 more oppressive than the competing, universalizing discourse of acts 
 (“safer sex”). In the double binds implicit in the space overlapped 
 by both, the stakes in matters of definitional control are extremely 
 high.^ 
 
 One thing that does emerge with clarity from this complex and 
 contradictory map of sexual and gender definition is that the pos¬ 
 sible grounds to be found there for alliance and cross-identification 
 among various groups will also be plural. To take the issue of gender 
 definition alone: under a gender separatist topos, lesbians might look 
 for identifications and alliances among women in general including 
 straight women (as in Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” model); 
 and gay men, as in Friedlander’s model—or more recent “male lib¬ 
 eration” models—of masculinity, might look for them among men in 
 general including straight men. Under a topos of gender inversion or 
 liminality, on the other hand, gay men might look to identify with 
 straight women (on grounds that they are also “feminine” or also de¬ 
 sire men), or with lesbians (on grounds that they similarly occupy a 
 liminal position): while lesbians might analogously look to identify 
 with gay men or, though this latter identification has not been strong 
 since second-wave feminism, with straight men. Note, however, that 
 this schematization over “the issue of gender definition alone” also 
 impinges on the issue of homo/heterosexual definition, and in an 
 unexpectedly chiasmic way. Gender-separatist models like Rich’s or 
 Friedlander’s seem to tend toward universalizing understandings of 
 homo/heterosexual potential. To the degree that gender-integrative 
 inversion or liminality models suggest an alliance or identity be¬ 
 tween lesbians and gay men, on the other hand, they tend toward 
 gay-separatist, minoritizing models of specifically gay identity and 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 61 
 
 politics. These crossings are quite contingent, however, as suggested 
 by Freud’s universalizing understanding of sexual definition which 
 seems to go with an integrative, inversion model of gender definition. 
 And more broadly, the routes to be taken across this misleadingly 
 symmetrical map are fractured in a particular historical situation 
 by the profound asymmetries of gender oppression and heterosexist 
 oppression. 
 
 For a particular gay or lesbian subject, then, to choose a figure in 
 a different position with whom to identify even partially always has 
 the potential of being revelatory in some way about some aspect of 
 the positioning of the subject her- or himself: not through a vague 
 invocation of the commonality of all people of all genders and sexu¬ 
 alities, though that may also be at work, but through the complex 
 and conflictual specificities of what different positionings may have 
 in common under the contradictory definitional aegises of our cen¬ 
 tury. 
 
 Willa Gather’s 1905 short story, “Paul’s Case: A Study in Tempera¬ 
 ment,” was her own lifelong favorite among her stories, the one 
 she republished most and the only one she allowed to be antholo¬ 
 gized by others. The omphalos of her continuing attachment to this 
 story is oddly difficult to locate; but (if it’s permissible to compli¬ 
 cate the navel metaphor in this way) the knotted-up surgical scar 
 of her detachment from the story’s main character is almost its first 
 legible sign. “It was Paul’s afternoon to appear before the faculty of 
 the Pittsburgh High School to account for his various misdemeanors,” 
 the story begins: with a “rancour and aggrievedness” for which they 
 themselves feel shamed by their inability to account, the teachers of 
 this tense, unlovely, effeminate, histrionic boy “fell upon him with¬ 
 out mercy, his English teacher leading the pack.”^ 
 
 Once, when he had been making a synopsis of a paragraph at 
 the blackboard, his English teacher had stepped to his side and 
 attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started back with a shud¬ 
 der and thrust his hands violently behind him. The astonished 
 woman could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed had 
 he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and definitely 
 
62 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another, he had 
 made all his teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the 
 same feeling of physical aversion. 
 
 The equivocalness of “the same feeling of physical aversion”—does 
 the aversion live in his body, or in theirs: or is the aversiveness tied 
 up with a certain threat of de-differentiation between them?—seems 
 fulfilled when it is the teachers, and not the object of their discipline, 
 who “left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to have 
 felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling in 
 cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the grew- 
 some game of intemperate reproach.” And that evening, when the 
 English teacher arrives at a concert for which the boy is officiously 
 acting as usher, it is she who betrays “some embarrassment when she 
 handed Paul the tickets, and a hauteur which subsequently made her 
 feel very foolish.” 
 
 The Pittsburgh High School English teacher evaporates as a char¬ 
 acter from “Paul’s Case” shortly thereafter—“Paul forgot even the 
 nastiness of his teacher’s being there.” There is nothing in the story to 
 suggest where her unushered homeward steps will take her, though 
 they would have taken one Pittsburgh high school English teacher 
 any evening in 1905 back to a bedroom shared with a sumptuously 
 beautiful young woman, Isabelle McClung, who has defied her par¬ 
 ents to the extent of bringing her imposing lover, Willa Gather, into 
 the family home to live. While this English teacher doesn’t require 
 to be identified with that English teacher, it is also less easy than it 
 might be to differentiate firmly their attitudes toward what Katherine 
 Anne Porter confidently labels as “a real ‘case’ in the clinical sense of 
 the word,” that is to say, “boys like Paul.”* 
 
 Paul’s teachers feel humiliated because they have found themselves 
 momentarily unified in a ritual of scapegoating, without being at 
 all clear what it is in the scapegoat that deserves torment or even 
 what provokes this sudden communal construction. Gather herself 
 had some history of being an effeminophobic bully; perhaps also of 
 feeling shamed by being one. Ten years before “Paul’s Case,” for in¬ 
 stance, in 1895, the year when a new homophobic politics of indignity 
 had its watershed international premiere in the trials of Oscar Wilde, 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 63 
 
 Gather published two columns on Wilde. In each of these, she har¬ 
 nesses her own prose eagerly to the accelerating rhetoric of the public 
 auto-da-fe. Wilde is not just some random sinner—certainly not the 
 object of any injustice—but something more, a signal criminal of 
 Luciferian stature, the “ghastly eruption that makes [society] hide its 
 face in shame.” ^ Wilde “is in prison now, most deservedly so. Upon 
 his head is heaped the deepest infamy and the darkest shame of his 
 generation. Civilization shudders at his name, and there is absolutely 
 no spot on earth where this man can live. Cain’s curse was light com¬ 
 pared with his.” Joining so perfervidly in the public scapegoating of 
 Wilde, Gather also seems, however, to assert a right, earned by the 
 very excess of her revilement, to define for herself, and differently 
 from the way the society or for that matter the courts had defined it. 
 the “true” nature of Wilde’s sin and hence the true justification for 
 his punishment of two years’ imprisonment with hard labor. Wilde’s 
 disgrace is, in Gather’s account, no isolated incident but “the begin¬ 
 ning of a national expiation” for “the sin which insults the dignity 
 of man, and of God in whose image he was made,” “the potenti¬ 
 ality of all sin, the begetter of all evil.” And that sin? “—Insincerity.” 
 “Art that is artificial and insincere” is the true “sin against the holy 
 spirit,” “for which there is no forgiveness in Heaven, no forgetting in 
 Hell.” The odd oversight of the framers of the Criminal Law Amend¬ 
 ment Act and the 1885 Labouchere amendment to it, in omitting to 
 include by name the unspeakable crimes of artificiality and insin¬ 
 cerity, doesn’t slow Gather a bit in this determined act of redefinition. 
 Reactivating the ancient, barely latent cognitive antithesis between 
 homosexual acts and the natural, Gather strongly reinforces the as¬ 
 saultive received association between Wilde’s sexuality and a repro¬ 
 bated, putatively feminine love of artifice. At the same time, though, 
 distinguishing however slightly and invidiously the one crime from 
 the other (“The sins of the body are very small compared with that”), 
 she also holds open a small shy gap of nonidentification between the 
 two in which some nascent germ of gay-affirmative detachment, of 
 critique, or even of outlaw love might shelter to await her own less 
 terroristic or terrorized season. 
 
 Had that season arrived with the writing a decade later of “Paul’s 
 Case”? In the early, Pittsburgh part of the story, it seems, quite to 
 
64 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 the contrary, that the identification between Paul’s pathology on the 
 one hand and his insincerity and artificiality on the other is so seam¬ 
 less that the former is to be fully evoked by the latter, through a 
 mercilessly specular, fixated point of view that takes his theatrical 
 self-presentation spitefully at its word. “His eyes were remarkable for 
 a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a con¬ 
 scious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy.” Paul’s 
 glance is a jerkily unsteady one—“Paul was always smiling, always 
 glancing about him, seeming to feel that people might be watching 
 him and trying to detect something”—but the gaze of the narrative at 
 him is so unresting as to give point to his desperate way of regarding 
 the world; one English teacher, at least, is eternally there to describe 
 him “looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some 
 of his teachers were not there to witness his light-heartedness.” Like 
 Gather’s Wilde a decade earlier, it seems as if Paul is to be hounded 
 to exhaustion or death for a crime that hovers indeterminately be¬ 
 tween sex/gender irregularity and spoilt sensibility or bad art. The 
 invidious need of a passionate young lesbian to place, and at a dis¬ 
 tance, the lurid, contagious scandal of male homosexuality: it is as 
 if that were not quite to be disentangled from the invidious need 
 of a hungry young talent to distinguish itself once and for all from 
 the “hysterical” artifice of the hapless youth who needs talent but 
 hasn’t it. 
 
 If the early parts of “Paul’s Case” seem written from the unloving 
 compulsions of the English teacher, however, the latter part of the 
 story, after Paul has stolen a thousand dollars from his father’s em¬ 
 ployer and run away to New York, opens out to what seems to me an 
 amazing tenderness of affirmation. How common is it, in a fictional 
 tradition ruled by le tnensonge romantique, for a powerfully desiring 
 character to get the thing that he desires, and to learn immediately 
 that he was right—that what he wanted really is the thing that would 
 make him happy? And especially in the specific tradition of, shall 
 we say, Madame Bovary, the fictional lineage whose geography con¬ 
 sists solely of the provinces and the capital, and whose motive for 
 desire is an acculturated stimulus that is explicitly said to be at once 
 entire artifice and yet less than art? But this is what happens to the 
 furtive, narrow-chested, nerve-twanging Paul in snowy New York. 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 65 
 
 Furnished in one single expert shopping spree with suits, shoes, hat, 
 scarfpin, brushes, handsome luggage, installed in a suite in the Wal¬ 
 dorf, catered to with violets and jonquils, bathed, warmed, rested, 
 and dressed, the opera in prospect and the popping of champagne 
 corks to waltz music, Paul looks in the mirror the next day: “Every¬ 
 thing was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always 
 wanted to be.” And it seems to be true. Even when, days later, run¬ 
 ning out of money and time he throws himself in front of a train 
 and is crushed to atoms, nothing has undermined the preciousness for 
 Paul of, not art, but the chrism of a feminized or homosexualized cul¬ 
 ture and artifice. “He felt now that his surroundings explained him”; 
 the lights forgivingly, expensively lowered, himself at last the see¬ 
 ing consciousness of the story, even the past of his life and his body 
 are, as in a coming out, reknit with the new, authoritative fingers 
 of his own eyes. “He realized well enough that he had always been 
 tormented by ... a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as 
 the meshes of the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling 
 the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. . . .” This offering of Paul’s 
 proprioception is a new gift to the reader. “There had always been the 
 shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but 
 from which something seemed always to be watching him.” But now 
 —“these were his people, he told himself.” “It would be impossible 
 for anyone to humiliate him.” If Gather, in this story, does something 
 to cleanse her own sexual body of the carrion stench of Wilde’s vic¬ 
 timization, it is thus (unexpectedly) by identifying with what seems 
 to be Paul’s sexuality not in spite of but through its saving reabsorp¬ 
 tion in a gender-liminal (and very specifically classed) artifice that 
 represents at once a particular subculture and culture itself. 
 
 Gather’s implicit reading here of the gendering of sex picks out 
 one possible path through the mazed junction at which long-residual 
 issues of gender and class definition intersected new turn-of-the- 
 century mappings of sexual choice and identification. In what 1 
 am reading as Gather’s move in “Paul’s Gase,” the mannish lesbian 
 author’s coming together with the effeminate boy on the ground of a 
 certain distinctive position of gender liminality is also a move toward 
 a minority gay identity whose more effectual cleavage, whose more 
 determining separatism, would be that of homo/heterosexua/ choice 
 
66 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 rather than that of male/female gender. The playing out of this story 
 through the intertwinings of such gender-polarized terms as culture, 
 artifice, and the punitive gaze, however, means that the thick seman¬ 
 tics of gender asymmetry will cling to the syntax however airy of 
 gender crossing and recrossing—clogging or rendering liable to slip¬ 
 page the gears of reader or authorial relation with a special insistence 
 of viscosity. 
 
 Such formulations as these might push us toward some new 
 hypotheses and new clusterings in the rich tradition of cross-gender 
 inventions of homosexuality of the past century whose distinguished 
 constituency might include—along with Gather—^James, Proust, 
 Yourcenar, Compton-Burnett, Renault, and more recent writers in 
 sometimes less “literary” forms such as Gayle Rubin, Esther Newton, 
 Susan Sontag, Judy Grahn, Joanna Russ—or, I might add. Prince in his 
 astonishingly Proustian recent hit single “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” 
 We could ask, for instance, about a text like James’s The Bostonians, 
 whether certain vindictive wrenchings of it out of “shape,” warpings 
 in its illusionistic surface of authorial control and address, might not 
 represent less a static parti pris against women’s desire for women 
 than a dangerously unresolved question about it. How far, the novel 
 asks, or more powerfully resists asking for fear of either the answer or 
 no answer or too many answers—how far are these two things paral¬ 
 lel or comparable: the ventriloquistic, half-contemptuous, hot desire 
 of Olive Chancellor for a girl like Verena Tarrant; the ventriloquis¬ 
 tic, half-contemptuous, hot desire of Henry James for a boy like Basil 
 Ransome? To the degree that they aren’t parallel, the intimate access 
 of the authorial consciousness to the characters’ must be dangerously 
 compromised; to the degree that they are, so must its panoptic fram¬ 
 ing authority of distance and diagnostic privilege. Whether (in those 
 waning decades of an intensive American homosociality) men’s de¬ 
 sire for men represents most the central and naturalizing maleness 
 of its communicants, and women’s for women an ultrafemininity un¬ 
 natural only for its overtypifying concentration; or whether (in those 
 inaugural years of medical, psychiatric, and legal discourses, both 
 pro- and anti-gay, that variously distinguished “homosexuals” male 
 and female as a singular minority) a same-sex desire necessarily in- 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 67 
 
 voked, as well, a cross-gender liminality; the crisscrossed reading of 
 such desires so ruptures the authorial surface of James’s writing that 
 what shoves through it here is the fist not of a male-erotic ecriture 
 but less daringly of a woman-hating and feminist-baiting violence of 
 panic. 
 
 A more truly sexy moment, in Proust, gives the thrill of autho¬ 
 rial availability through these eruptive diagonals of definition. After 
 the flight and death of his probably lesbian mistress Albertine, the 
 narrator of A la recherche, his jealousy only the more inflamed by 
 its posthumousness, dispatches on an errand of detection and recon¬ 
 struction along the trail of her elopement a functionary named Aime, 
 a headwaiter who has himself already been both a procurer and an 
 object of desire both within and across gender through several vol¬ 
 umes of this novel. Aime sends back an account of Albertine which 
 the narrator reproduces thus, its peculiarity being that Aime, half- 
 educated, “when he meant to put inverted commas . . . put brackets, 
 and when he meant to put something in brackets . . . put it in inverted 
 commas’’:* 
 
 “The young laundry-girl confessed to me that she enjoyed play¬ 
 ing around with her girlfriends and that seeing Mile Albertine 
 was always rubbing up against her in her bathing-wrap she made 
 her take it off and used to caress her with her tongue along the 
 throat and arms. . . . After that she told me nothing more, but 
 being always at your service and ready to do anything to oblige 
 you, 1 took the young laundry-girl to bed with me. She asked me 
 if 1 would like her to do to me what she used to do to Mile Alber¬ 
 tine when she took off her bathing-dress. And she said to me: (If 
 you could have seen how she used to wriggle, that young lady, 
 she said to me (oh, it’s too heavenly) and she got so excited that 
 she could not keep from biting me.) 1 could still see the marks 
 on the laundry-girl’s arms.’’’ 
 
 The deroutinization of the subordinating work of punctuation here 
 strips away the insulation of the text against every juxtaposition of 
 sexualities. Albertine to the laundry-girl, the laundry-girl to Aime, 
 Aime to the male narrator, the narrator to the reader: the insubordi- 
 
68 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 nated address of pain and ecstasy is anchored only at the last moment 
 by its cryptic laundry-mark, residue of a rinsing and ravenous illegible 
 rapture. 
 
 This highly chiasmic organization of homo/heterosexual definition 
 in Proust, which prompts Leo Bersani to formulate “the ontological 
 necessity of homosexuality [in the other sex] in a kind of universal 
 heterosexual relation of all human subjects to their own desires,” 
 confirms that insofar as a growing minority gay identity does or 
 did depend on a model of gender liminality, it tends to invest with 
 meaning transpositions between male and female homosexuality, but 
 also between the bonds of homo- and heterosexuality. The Proustian 
 example suggests that this choreography of crossings, identification, 
 and momentary symmetries, this hummingbird ballet of within and 
 without the parenthesis, represents a utopian possibility somewhere 
 to one side of the stresses of gender or of other exploitations: 1 think 
 there is evidence, however, that the truth of this choreography of 
 cross-translation is at once less blithe and more interesting. 
 
 Back, for one final example, to Willa Gather; to her beautiful and 
 difficult novel The Professor’s House, whose eponymous domesticity 
 (the house itself, that is to say, not the Professor) is biographically 
 thought to allude to the enabling provision for Gather’s own writing 
 of a room of her own, first by Isabelle McGlung and then perhaps 
 by her more domesticated and serviceable companion/lover of de¬ 
 cades, Edith Lewis. Though the love that sustains these necessary 
 facilitations has been a lesbian one, its two crystallizations in the 
 novel are both cross-translations: one across gender, into the gor¬ 
 geous homosocial romance of two men on a mesa in New Mexico; 
 the other across sexuality as well as gender, into the conventional 
 but enabling heterosexual marriage of a historian of the Spanish in 
 the New World. As with the insubordinating parentheses in Proust, 
 the male-homosocial romance represents at the same time the inside 
 lining of the heterosexual bond (since the two segments of the do¬ 
 mestic story flank their own history in the flashback interpolation 
 of the mesa story) and equally its exterior landscape (since the Blue 
 Mesa romance of Tom Outland, true to his name, is also figured in 
 the “single square window, swinging outward on hinges” that vents 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 69 
 
 from the Professor’s attic study the asphyxiating gas of his stove, and 
 admits to it the “long, blue, hazy smear”—the view of Lake Michi¬ 
 gan “like an open door that nobody could shut”—that makes the 
 empowering distance for his intellectual achievements and desires)." 
 The room of one’s own, in short, as a room with a view: in this text 
 the crossing of the upstairs/downstairs vertical axis of heterosexual 
 domesticity by the space-clearing dash of a male-male romance may 
 somehow refract and decompress the conditions of a lesbian love and 
 creativity. 
 
 What become visible in this double refraction are the shadows of 
 the brutal suppressions by which a lesbian love did not in Willa 
 Gather’s time and culture freely become visible as itself. Still, we can 
 look for affordances offered by that love to these particular refrac¬ 
 tions. On the one hand, there is the distinctive sensuality attributed 
 to the male-homosocial romance, its extravagant loyalties aerated by 
 extroversion, eye-hunger, and inexpressiveness. On the other hand, 
 there is the canny and manipulative relation to permeable privacies, 
 of a tradition of heterosexual marriage in which marriage is inveter- 
 ately reconstituted in relation to its others, in the age-old economy 
 of the muse represented in this book by the memory of the dead 
 boy Tom Outland. Each of these refractions seems moreover to be 
 a way of telling the same story: the story of how expensive and 
 wasteful a thing creative energy is, and how intimately rooted in a 
 plot of betrayal or exploitation: Tom Outland’s conscious and em¬ 
 powering betrayal of his beloved friend on the mesa, the Professor’s 
 self-deceived expropriation of the labor, vitality, and money of his 
 wife and daughters. Certainly there is no reason why the right artist 
 at the right moment cannot embody these truths that seem to be, 
 among other things, lesbian truths, directly in the plots of lesbian de¬ 
 sire, nurturance, betrayal, exploitation, creativity from which they 
 here seem to have sprung. Then why not here? Among the reasons 
 Gather may have had for not doing so must have been, besides the 
 danger to herself and her own enabling privacy, the danger also from 
 this particular steely and un-utopic plot to the early and still-fragile 
 development of any lesbian plot as a public possibility for carrying 
 value and sustaining narrative. 
 
70 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 She may also, however, have liked the advantage there was to be 
 taken of these other, refracted plots as the most apt carriers, brewed 
 in the acid nuance of centuries, for the exposition precisely of ex¬ 
 ploitation and betrayal. Anyone who knows how to read anything is 
 experienced in reading, for instance, the story of a husband; we have 
 all read that one all our lives, however resentfully or maybe all the 
 better because resentfully. Our skills are honed to hear its finest vibra¬ 
 tions and hollownesses: the constitutive one-sidedness of the story, 
 the self-pity masquerading as toughness, self-ignorance as clearsight¬ 
 edness, abject exactions as rugged independence. We hear this and 
 yet, in our immemorial heterosexist intimacy with this plot, we are 
 also practiced in how not to stop listening there. We are experienced 
 at looking in this place, even, for unrecognized pockets of value and 
 vitality that can hit out in unpredictable directions. 
 
 The Professor’s House ends with the exaction of such a reading, I 
 think. Alone in his study while his family has summered in Europe, 
 the Professor now feels he has taken the manful measure of the hard 
 truths of life itself, the ones most alien, he insists, to the venal and 
 feminized values of the familial (read female) life that had supported 
 and must return to envelop him. 
 
 He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have 
 to learn to. . . . 
 
 ... He doubted whether his family would ever realize that he 
 was not the same man they had said good-bye to; they would be 
 too happily preoccupied with their own affairs. If his apathy hurt 
 them, they could not possibly be so much hurt as he had been 
 already. At least, he felt the ground under his feet. He thought 
 he knew where he was, and that he could face with fortitude the 
 Berengaria and the future.'^ 
 
 “Face with fortitude the Berengaria and the future,” the novel’s last 
 words. Conceivably it is the very coarseness and obviousness of the 
 gender asymmetry of heterosexual marriage that licenses, here, a 
 certain sadism of suspicious reading, that forces us not to take this 
 straight as the zero-degree of revelation in Willa Gather’s novel. It 
 might impel us to want to lay our ear against the tight-stretched drum 
 
Across Gender, Across Sexuality 71 
 
 of that stirring nonsense word, the she-vessel’s name Berengaria. (A 
 nonsense word insofar as it is a proper noun, it has for the same 
 reason its own attachments: Berengaria was the wife of Richard the 
 Lion-Hearted, who was known for preferring to her intimacy that 
 of men including, legendarily, his young minstrel.) Berengaria —a 
 very mother-lode of anagrammatic energia; within language, a force 
 of nature, a force of cleavage. Underneath the regimented gram- 
 matic f-f-fortitudes of the heterosexist orderings of marriage, there 
 are audible in this alphabet the more purely semantic germs of any 
 vital possibility: Berengaria, ship of women: the {green} {aria}, the 
 {eager} {brain}, the {bearing} and the {bairn}, the {raring} {engine}, 
 the {bargain} {binge}, the {ban} and {bar}, the {garbage}, the {barrage} 
 of {anger}, the {bare} {grin}, the {rage} to {err}, the {rare} {grab} for 
 {being}, the {begin} and {rebegin} {again}. 
 
 Notes 
 
 The people who sparked my interest in “Paul's Case” were an English teacher, Rita 
 Kosofsky, and a graduate student, Eric Peterson (whose English teacher 1 was), on 
 whose work on “Paul’s Case” this reading tries to build. This essay is part of my 
 forthcoming book, Epistemology of the Closet, to be published by the University of 
 California Press in early 1990. 
 
 1 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexu¬ 
 ality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance 
 (Boston, 1984), 307-8. 
 
 2 Jonathan Ned Katz. Gay I Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York, 
 
 1983). 145-50. 
 
 3 Donald Mager, “Gay Theories of Gender Role Deviance,” SubStance 46 (1985): 35- 
 36. His sources here are John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual 
 Rights Movement (New York, 1974), and James D. Steakley, The Homosexual 
 Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York, 1975). 
 
 4 This argument is given more fully in “Epistemology of the Closet 1,” Raritan 4 
 (Spring 1988): 39-69. 
 
 5 All quotations from “Paul’s Case” are from Willa Cather, Five Stories (New York, 
 
 1956), 149-74- 
 
 6 Katherine Anne Porter, “A Note,” in Willa Cather, The Troll Garden (New York, 
 1971), 150-51- 
 
 7 The Kingdom of Art: Willa Gather's First Principles and Critical Statements 1893- 
 1896, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), 390. See also 389-93. 
 
72 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
 8 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence 
 Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York, 1982), 3: 525. 
 
 9 Ibid., 535. 
 
 10 Leo Bersani, “The Culture of Redemption: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein,” 
 Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter 1986): 416. 
 
 11 Willa Gather, The Professor’s House (New York, 1973), 16, 28, 30. 
 
 12 Ibid., 282-83. 
 
Joseph A. Boone 
 
 Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell’s 
 Alexandria Quartet 
 
 11 is hard to recapture the intense excitement 
 that greeted the publication of Lawrence Dur- 
 rell’s Alexandria Quartet in the late 1950 s— 
 my parents’ generation keenly awaited each 
 successive volume with a sense of partici¬ 
 pating in the making of a masterpiece. The 
 success of the Quartet could be measured 
 not only in its popular reception and gen¬ 
 erally glowing reviews, but also, on an in¬ 
 stitutional level, in the literally hundreds of 
 scholarly articles it spawned in the following 
 decade: the Durrell entries in the MLA Bib¬ 
 liography for this period vie in number with 
 those accorded long-time favorites like Law¬ 
 rence, Joyce, and Faulkner. Simultaneously, 
 the Quartet found its way onto Ivy League 
 syllabi; while Albert J. Guerard sang Dur¬ 
 rell’s praises at Harvard, Walton Litz made 
 the Quartet a highlight of his modern fic¬ 
 tion course at Princeton. This masterpiece, it 
 seemed clear, was going to be around for a 
 long while. 
 
 Durrell’s critical stock, ironically, couldn’t 
 be lower today; his blend of existential soul- 
 
74 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 searching and lush romanticism stands at a far remove from current 
 postmodern critical sensibilities. And indeed, at worst, a synopsis of 
 the Quartet’s multilayered plots sounds ominously similar to televi¬ 
 sion’s “Dynasty” series: a panorama of ever-shifting sexual align¬ 
 ments glossed over with a pretense to sophistication—or, as one early 
 detractor put it, “Melodramatic erotica . . . made respectable by 
 epigrammatic catchphrases.” ‘ I’d like to suggest, however, that if we 
 employ some of the insights that have marked literary criticism— 
 particularly narrative and gender theory—since Durrell’s eclipse, we 
 will find a text very much worth our attention, not so much for its 
 successes as for the way it insistently dramatizes the sexual politics 
 of the colonial narrative, especially as filtered through the eyes of 
 its desiring male—and ostensibly heterosexual—narrator, Darley, a 
 blocked writer and confused sexual subject for whom issues of erotic 
 perception, masculine subjectivity, and narrative authority are inex¬ 
 tricably linked. 
 
 The “investigation of modern love” that is DurrelTs declared sub¬ 
 ject matter pivots upons his narrator’s negotiation of the labyrinthine 
 mazes of Egyptian—and specifically Alexandrian—sensuality.^ In the 
 process, Egypt becomes much more than an exotic backdrop to the 
 Quartet; rather, its geopolitical reality is transformed into a kind of 
 psychic playground upon which Durrell can project titillating visions 
 of sexual otherness and polymorphous freeplay. Not coincidentally, 
 engaging with libidinous fantasy on this symbolic terrain frees Darley 
 to emerge as mature novelist and successful lover at the end of the 
 fourth volume. But Darley’s (and Durrell’s) response to the lure of 
 foreign otherness is double-edged: such figurations of Oriental sexu¬ 
 ality, for all their attraction, are also terrifying, not the least because 
 they give vent to possibilities unthinkable within a Western construc¬ 
 tion of the masculine—hence posing a threat to the very constitution 
 of white male subjectivity. And, tellingly, within the psychodramatic 
 landscape of the Quartet that unthinkability is time and again coded 
 as the specter of homosexuality. The possibility—and fear—of being 
 “unmanned” by homoerotic impulses gives the Quartet its decon- 
 structive twist, in that the four novels map out a geography of male 
 desire in which Darley’s quest for identity depends upon a continual 
 negotiation of the one taboo that undermines its goals of “hetero- 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 75 
 
 sexual” fulfillment and a “written” text. If the Near East seems to 
 hold the promise of literary inspiration and (dreams of) sexual lib¬ 
 eration for Durrell, these discursive manifestations of homosexuality 
 suggest another story, one that can tell us much about the sexual 
 anxieties motoring the enterprise of male-authored colonial narrative 
 and its relation to phallocentric discourse. 
 
 In 1935 the yet unknown Durrell wrote a gushing fan letter to the 
 current bete noir of literary letters, Henry Miller, whose infamously 
 graphic Tropic of Cancer Durrell proclaimed to be “the only really 
 man-size piece of work which this century can . . . boast of.” Miller, 
 his “man-size” ego no doubt flattered by such praise, quickly wrote 
 back, touting Durrell’s views a mirror of his own (“it’s the kind of let¬ 
 ter I would have written myself”): thus began a series of narcissisti- 
 cally enabling epistolary exchanges that would bond the two writers, 
 man to man, in a life-long correspondence.^ The terms of Durrell’s 
 adulation, of course, also reveal the young writer’s desire to produce 
 his own “man-size piece of work”—a goal which in terms of sheer 
 bulk, if not in terms of outright sexual explicitness, he accomplished 
 twenty-odd years later with the publication of the Alexandria Quar¬ 
 tet. It is not surprising, then, to find an echo of this early ambition 
 espoused by the Quartet’s one successful writer-figure, the larger- 
 than-life Pursewarden, who announces that he wants to write a novel 
 “characterised by a total lack of codpiece'.” But precisely how, under 
 Miller’s inspiration, did Durrell learn to divest himself of his “cod¬ 
 piece,” to let it all hang out, as it were, in order to display a “piece of 
 work” that, as he says of Tropic, “goes straight up among those books 
 . . . which men have built out of their own guts”? 
 
 With this phallic imagery towering before us, we might turn to 
 another of the young Durrell’s epistolary homages to his literary mas¬ 
 ter: “in telling anyone about myself these days,” he proudly boasts, 
 “I always say I’m the first writer to be fertilized by H. M.”* If, as one 
 critic puts it, “Miller’s seed obviously fell on fallow soil,” we may rea¬ 
 sonably wonder what it meant for Durrell to find himself assuming a 
 procreative role so diametrically opposed to his man-size ambitions.® 
 “Creative” intercourse this may only be, but the fact, nonetheless, is 
 
76 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 that Durrell’s wording places him in a specifically “feminine” relation 
 to his mentor, one in which the fledgling novelist’s proud task is the 
 sexual one of serving as womb (or “fallow soil”) to Miller’s “seed.” 
 Language, one is tempted to deduce, subtly contaminates the hitherto 
 platonic terms of this manly friendship.^ 
 
 Even more fascinating, in the light of language’s destabilizing po¬ 
 tential, is the metaphor that Durrell uses when writing Miller from 
 Alexandria, seven years later, to describe Eve Cohen, his future wife 
 and original inspiration for the Quartet's archetypal woman-temp- 
 tress, Justine. Attempting to capture the essence of this “strange, 
 smashing, dark-eyed woman” for Miller, Durrell declares that his en¬ 
 ticing new acquaintance “is Tropic of Capricorn walking.” From Dur¬ 
 rell’s point of view, it would appear that Miller’s man-size oeuvre— 
 Capricorn having superseded Cancer —has grown altogether feminine 
 legs. And with this figurative metamorphosis of one text (Miller’s) 
 into a woman (Eve) who becomes the basis for another text (Dur¬ 
 rell’s), the younger partner in this literary collaboration adroitly re¬ 
 verses the sexual dynamic inscribed in the earlier letter; it is now 
 Durrell who assumes the male role and Miller, via the agency of 
 this female incarnation of his Tropic, who is inseminated. For Eve 
 becomes, quite literally, Durrell’s means of access to an “inside” of 
 Egyptian sexuality that he penetrates not only as lover but as voyeur 
 and, ultimately, writer: “She sits for hours on the bed and tells me 
 all about the sex life of Arabs,” Durrell writes to Miller, proceeding 
 to list what sounds like a precis of the various exotica forming the 
 backdrop of the Quartet: “perversions, circumcision, hashish, sweet¬ 
 meats, removal of the clitoris, cruelty, murder. . . . [S]he has seen the 
 inside of Egypt to the last rotten dung-blown flap of obscenity.”® 
 Durrell fertilized by H. M., Miller’s Tropic penetrated by Durrell: 
 such metaphorically (t) horny intersections should inspire us to look, 
 once again, at the sexual negotiations that make up the lush roman¬ 
 ticism of the Alexandria Quartet. On one level, the Durrell-Miller 
 relation resembles the homosocial pattern of male bonding outlined 
 by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.’ Hence, when Durrell, reminiscing about 
 the closing of the French brothels, laments the loss of some “mar¬ 
 vellous encounters,” he is not talking about encounters with their 
 female clientele but, rather, those with the other male patrons, par¬ 
 ticularly his fellow artists: “1 spent some fabulous hours with Henry 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 77 
 
 Miller at the Sphinx,” he remembers—hours “spent,” we are surely 
 meant to assume, in verbal rather than, as the archaic expression 
 goes, the “criminal conversation” more commonly associated with 
 maisons cIoses^° Such homosocial behavior, as Sedgwick points out, 
 is neither antithetical to patriarchal formations (such as brothels) 
 nor to male heterosexual (and often homophobic) norms. And of 
 the sexual orientation of this “priest of heterosexual love,”" there is 
 “no homosexual component at all,” his friend and critic G. S. Fraser 
 hurries to assure us: “Durrell is an extraordinarily purely masculine 
 creature. ... He has had three marriages ... in each case to an 
 extremely attractive woman.”Fraser’s defense of Durrell, mediated 
 by the evidence of Durrell’s wives, indeed provides an apt illustration 
 of Sedgwick’s homosocial theory at work: Fraser avoids his own con¬ 
 tamination, in speaking of such unsavory matters as homosexual ten¬ 
 dencies in writers, while also asserting Durrell’s monolithic hetero¬ 
 sexuality. 
 
 On another level, however, the premise of homosocial bonding, 
 pervasive as it is in the world of the Alexandria Quartet, doesn’t 
 seem to me the only way to get at the curiously elliptical negotia¬ 
 tions of “other” sexualities that not only keep rearing their heads in 
 the Miller-Durrell correspondence, but that also determine the paths 
 whereby the whole problematic of masculine (hetero)sexual identifi¬ 
 cation, with all its attendant uncertainties, is continually brought to 
 bear on the act of writing in the Quartet.'^ Durrell-as-writer obviously 
 holds to an at least partially phallocentric creed—as his desire to 
 emulate Miller’s man-size work attests—but the fact is that the very 
 means of his craft with which he has chosen to experiment in the 
 Quartet —language, structure, point of view—work to evoke a flux of 
 libidinous desire which, once freed into his text, threatens to over¬ 
 whelm the coherence of its representations of masculine heterosexual 
 competence. What ensues is a profound case of authorial anxiety in 
 which the “imaginary geography”'^ of Durrell’s eroticized Egyptian 
 landscape helps to throw the modernist and masculinist tenets of his 
 text into disarray. 
 
 In the four interlocking volumes of the Quartet, issues of sexuality 
 and writing are never far apart: “loving is only a sort of skin language. 
 
78 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 sex a terminology merely,” Darley writes; the novelist Pursewarden 
 dreams of a novel that will “have the curvature of an embrace, the 
 wordlessness of a lover’s code.”‘^ Thus Justine, the first volume of 
 the Quartet, begins with Darley’s retrospective and highly subjec¬ 
 tive attempt to come to grips with his narcissistic love affair with 
 the Egyptian-Jewish beauty Justine Hosani by recording events not 
 in chronological sequence but impressionistically, “in the order in 
 which they first became significant for me.” The blinders imposed by 
 his romantic solipsism become painfully clear in Balthazar, where 
 Darley is forced to relive the “truth” of the sensations he has recorded 
 in Justine from a completely different vantage point, that of the Alex¬ 
 andrian doctor Balthazar, whose “corrected” version of the Justine 
 manuscript reveals that Justine has possibly engineered the whole 
 affair to conceal her more important liaison with none other than 
 Pursewarden, Darley’s mentor. As if to underline further the insta¬ 
 bility of sexual and narrative perception, Mountolive relegates Darley 
 to the background of its action; the now omnisciently narrated action 
 reveals all the love plots of the first and second volumes to have been 
 “false,” screens for a greater political plot (involving the attempt of 
 Justine and her husband Nessim to rouse Coptic support for the over¬ 
 throw of Palestine). Only in the final volume of this quartet, Clea, 
 does time move forward, as Darley’s first-person narration resumes, 
 recording his return to Alexandria and successful love affair with 
 Clea, another expatriate European artist. 
 
 In employing multiple points of view to dramatize the instability of 
 truth and the relativity of known reality, Durrell gestures toward the 
 legacy of literary modernism, whose tenets, he intimates, his formal 
 experiments in the Quartet have revivified for a post-Einsteinian 
 nuclear age.‘® Durrell also shares with his modernist forebears the de¬ 
 sire to find a way of representing the spatiality of consciousness in 
 narrative form, of capturing the flux of “inner” reality and the drift 
 of subconscious desire. “7 would set my own book free to dream,” he 
 has one of the Quartet’s writers say, and he comes closest to achiev¬ 
 ing this aim in Balthazar, where he uses the surreal nightworld of 
 Alexandria to create a series of psychodramatic set pieces emblem¬ 
 atic of mental states. If the technique sounds familiar, it is because 
 Joyce does much the same thing with Dublin’s Nighttown in the Circe 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 79 
 
 section of Ulysses. But the stakes are quite different, as the follow¬ 
 ing passage illustrates. In this episode, Narouz, one of Darley’s many 
 alter egos, wanders through Alexandria’s prostitute district the night 
 of a Moslem religious festival: 
 
 From the outer perimeter of darkness came . . . the hoarse rum¬ 
 ble of the approaching procession with its sudden bursts of wild 
 music. . . . From the throat of a narrow alley . . . burst a long 
 tilting gallery of human beings headed by the leaping acrobats 
 and dwarfs of Alexandria, and followed at a dancing measure by 
 the long grotesque cavalcade of gonfalons, rising and falling in 
 a tide of mystical light, treading the peristaltic measures of the 
 wild music—nibbled out everywhere by the tattling flutes and 
 the pang of drums [and] the long shivering orgasm of tambou¬ 
 rines struck by dervishes in their habits as they moved towards 
 the site of the festival. . . . The night accommodated them all 
 —a prostitute singing in the harsh clipped accents of the land 
 to the gulp and spank of a fingerdrum, the cries of children, 
 
 . . . the cock-shies and snake-charmers, the freaks (Zubeida the 
 bearded woman and the calf with five legs), the great canvas 
 theatre outside which the muscle-dancers stood, naked except 
 for loin-cloths, to advertise their skill, and motionless, save for 
 the incredible rippling of their bodies—the flickering and toiling 
 of pectoral, abdominal and dorsal muscles, deceptive as summer 
 lightning. 
 
 Narouz was rapt and looked about him with the air of a drunk¬ 
 ard, revelling in it all. . . 
 
 As in Joyce’s Circe, this carnivalesque spectacle, with its pulsating 
 rhythms and cacophony of elements, attempts to represent in ex¬ 
 ternalized form an unleashing of the unconscious, a “setting free 
 [of] the polymorphous desires of the city.’’ On this level, DurrelTs 
 modernist and psychological intentions seem to work hand in hand: 
 his multidimensional, dispersive, polyphonic text approximates the 
 fragmented, anarchic, psychic terrain of the component instincts 
 sketched out, for instance, by Freud in the Three Essays on the Theory 
 of Sexuality. But this equation brings us to a more troubling facet 
 of the passage: the fact that its representation of the polymorphous 
 
80 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 perverse, of the “dark tides of Eros,” has been literally displaced onto 
 a foreign geography, that of Egypt.'® As such, The Alexandria Quartet 
 participates in the enterprise of colonial narrative, its modernist po¬ 
 lemics and its sexual politics inextricably bound to its representation 
 of Egyptian sexuality as an alluring but dangerously foreign other. 
 
 Edward Said’s Orientalism has been invaluable in its uncovering 
 of the discursive paths whereby countries like Egypt have come to 
 represent “one of [the West’s] deepest and most recurring images of 
 the Other.” The “threatening excess” of this otherness. Said suggests, 
 has most often been gendered as “feminine” and sexually available 
 so that it can be penetrated, cataloged, and therefore contained by 
 the “superior” rationality of the Western mind. The upshot of these 
 representations is an “almost uniform association between the Ori¬ 
 ent and sex.” Said takes Gustave Elaubert’s 1849-50 journey to Egypt 
 as paradigmatic of the Western writer’s tendency to idealize the East 
 as “a place where one could look for [a degree of] sexual experience 
 unobtainable in Europe” and enjoy “a different type of sexuality, 
 perhaps more libertine and less guilt-ridden.” An overview of Elau¬ 
 bert’s experience provides a useful context for evaluating Durrell’s 
 comparable fascination with Egyptian sensuality one hundred years 
 later.'® 
 
 First, however, we need to interrogate more precisely the nature 
 of the “unavailable” sexual experience to which Said is referring. In 
 Flaubert’s case, Said locates such desire in the writer’s affair with the 
 celebrated Egyptian female courtesan and dancer, Kuchuk Hanem. 
 Seeing in Kuchuk’s “luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality” 
 a symbol of Oriental fecundity, the young writer-to-be uses his diary 
 to transform her material presence, her fleshly being, into a sheerly 
 poetic occasion, making her “dumb and irreducible sexuality” the 
 stage for the exercise of his own creative musings and observations. 
 Such appropriation. Said argues, is typical of the Westerner’s experi¬ 
 ence of the East; the latter’s exoticism is deliberately experienced as 
 a titillating spectacle, a “living tableau of queerness” that the trav¬ 
 eler can enjoy voyeuristically but nonetheless stand apart from, thus 
 theoretically remaining untouched by its difference. 
 
 Yet what Said forgets to mention in analyzing the West’s sexualized 
 response to the Orient is precisely what his unfortunate wording— 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 81 
 
 “living tableau of queerness” — perhaps subconsciously betrays. For, 
 in Flaubert’s case, it is not the female Kuchuk but a homosexual male 
 dancer who first catches the traveler’s eye. Said’s oversight, it would 
 seem, is of a piece with the apologetic disclaimer that immediately 
 follows his account of Flaubert’s association of Egypt and sexuality: 
 “Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual 
 promise (and threat) ... is not the province of my analysis here, 
 alas, despite its frequently noted appearance.”^® And what is it that 
 Flaubert (quite literally) sees but that Said feels it necessary, “alas,” 
 to repress? As Flaubert puts it in a letter home to Louis Bouilhet, his 
 closest friend: 
 
 But we have seen male dancers. Oh! Oh! Oh! . . . [IJmagine two 
 rascals, quite ugly but charming in their corruption, in their ob¬ 
 scene leerings and the femininity of their movements, dressed 
 as women, their eyes painted with antimony. . . . [DJuring the 
 dance, the impressario . . . plays around them, kissing them on 
 the belly, the arse, and the small of the back, and making ob¬ 
 scene remarks in an effort to put additional spice into a thing 
 that is already quite clear in itself. ... I’ll have this marvellous 
 Hasan el-Belbeissi come again. He’ll dance the Bee for me, in 
 particular. Done by such a bardash as he, it can scarcely be a 
 thing for babes.^' 
 
 Given the fact that a “bardash” is, in modern terminology, a homo¬ 
 sexual, we might cast a second glance at that display of nakedly 
 rippling male flesh, otherwise “motionless” amidst the swirl of the 
 celebrants, evoked by Durrell in Balthazar, and note that the dazed 
 Narouz, his footsteps leading him through a corridor of “brilliantly 
 lighted circumcision booths,” comes to a halt before a riveting spec¬ 
 tacle: a “magnificent-looking male prostitute, whose oiled curls hung 
 down his back and whose eyes and lips were heavily painted” as his 
 breast is being tattooed. The miniature quest on which Durrell has 
 sent Narouz uncovers Hasan’s twentieth-century incarnation. “ 
 
 It hardly needs to be stressed that that which is erotically alluring 
 in these Western male representations of Egyptian sexuality is not 
 only, or necessarily, female, however “feminized” these objects may 
 appear. We need merely return to Elaubert’s account to confirm this 
 
82 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 intuition. On the one hand, Flaubert’s immediate defense against the 
 “charming corruption” of Hasan and his fellow dancers is to assume 
 the outsider’s position of artist-observer, noting that their dance “is 
 too beautiful to be exciting” and that their “ugliness” only “adds 
 . . . to the thing as art.” On the other hand, as the excited “Oh! Oh! 
 Oh!” and the wish to have Hasan “come again” to perform “a thing 
 that is already quite clear in itself” indicate, the sexuality of the 
 bardash is less easily turned into a purely aesthetic experience than 
 Flaubert’s language first suggests. Indeed, as he continues in his letter 
 to Bouilhet, “Speaking of bardashes, . . . [h]ere it is quite accepted. 
 One admits one’s sodomy, and it is spoken of at table in the hotel. 
 Sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody teases you 
 and you end up confessing”: whereupon, this womanizer and com¬ 
 pulsive habitue of brothels drolly adds, 
 
 we have considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejacu¬ 
 lation. . . . It’s at the baths that such things take place. You 
 reserve the bath for yourself . . . and you skewer your lad in one 
 of the rooms. Be informed, furthermore, that all the bath-boys 
 are bardashes. 
 
 What is remarkable here, as Flaubert goes on to narrate an abortive 
 attempt to be serviced by one of these “quite nice young boys,” is the 
 sheer ease of his transition from hetero- to homosexual banter: when 
 in Egypt, do as the Egyptians . .. seems the prevailing attitude. This is 
 not to suggest that Elaubert suddenly renounced his heterosexual pro¬ 
 pensities—to the contrary, his written record enumerates many such 
 encounters with great relish and exacting anatomical detail—but to 
 point to an unexpected opening in his perception of the conceivable 
 and doable. The behavior of his traveling companion, Maxime Du 
 Camp, might be taken as a paradigmatic example: “Max, the old 
 lecher,” is excited by native women at one moment, Flaubert reports 
 of the morning they arrive in Egypt, but the next is “just as excited 
 by little negro boys. By whom is he not excited? Or, rather, by whatl" 
 Nor does Flaubert remain immune to these unexpected sources of 
 titillation, as references scattered throughout his papers reveal: he 
 amusedly records the flagrant displays of male sexuality that mark his 
 journey down the Nile, lavishes a page of erotic description on one of 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 83 
 
 his crew’s youthful rowers (on whom he appears to have developed a 
 crush), and cavalierly confesses that he has consummated his “busi¬ 
 ness at the baths” with an ugly “young rascal”: “It made me laugh, 
 that’s all. But I’ll be at it again. To be done well, an experiment must 
 be repeated.”” 
 
 This fluid movement across sexual boundaries turns out to be con¬ 
 siderably more terrifying to Durrell’s Darley, but the possibility of 
 such effortless transgression remains very real for him, a situation 
 heightened by the continually blurring boundaries of Alexandria it¬ 
 self, a polyglot universe comprised, Darley writes at the beginning of 
 the Quartet, of “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds . . . [and] 
 more than five sexes, [with] only demotic Greek ... to distinguish 
 among them.”” This heterogeneity is also precisely what attracts 
 Durrell—and before him Flaubert—to Egypt as a symbolically femi¬ 
 nized terrain onto which he can project Western male fantasies of 
 sexual otherness and polymorphous freeplay, that unbridled eroti¬ 
 cism supposedly unavailable in European society. “The sexual prov¬ 
 ender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion,” 
 Darley notes in a voice at once envious and slightly frightened. And 
 although Durrell adds that “for the artist in [one]self . . . some con¬ 
 fusions of sensibility [are] valuable,”” the defamiliarizing experience 
 of Alexandria’s “variety and profusion” is as contradictory for Darley 
 as it is instructive: for the fact is that his quest for sexual identity 
 cannot escape a continual negotiation of the homoerotic, in the guise 
 of foreign otherness, that threatens the status of the personal and 
 public texts he wishes to produce. To make sense of the “confusions 
 of sensibility” that ensue from this homosexual subtext, we need to 
 turn, however briefly, to the overt heterosexuality of the Quartet’s 
 love plots and investigate Darley’s textual affair with Alexandria the 
 city and his sexual affair with Justine, its representative denizen. 
 
 The mysteriously strange, always protean world of Alexandria holds 
 a tantalizing allure for Darley, a seductive appeal that he attempts 
 to fend off by assuming, like Elaubert, the role of curious but de¬ 
 tached artist-spectator. This pose of uninvolvement, however, swiftly 
 breaks down when he meets and falls “blindly and passionately in 
 
84 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 love” with Justine—or rather, with “one of the many selves she pos¬ 
 sessed and inhabited,” for Justine is the embodiment of Alexandria’s 
 protean variety. To Darley’s Westernizing imagination, this protean 
 quality makes Justine the eternal feminine, ever evading capture yet 
 hopelessly yearning to be possessed by the right man; simultane¬ 
 ously, this quality renders her a variant of the archetypal Oriental 
 woman, a “voluptuar[y]... of pain” in whom a vast array of apparent 
 contraries meet: sensuality and asceticism, mystery and knowledge, 
 fecundity and sterility, pain and pleasure.^® So too Alexandria is a 
 combination of clashing elements, its divided origins reflected in its 
 mythic history, variously marked by Alexander’s library, Cleopatra’s 
 court, and Plotinus’s philosophy. A city without one unifying origin 
 or truth, Alexandria becomes the equivalent not only of Justine but 
 of the Quartet itself, whose ever-shifting points of view also reveal 
 that there is no single interpretation or representation that will cap¬ 
 ture its multiple realities. 
 
 Neither one thing nor the other, Alexandria functions as a passage, 
 a threshold between different cultures and ways of being; it remains a 
 promiscuous “whore among cities.” Similarly, within Darley’s imagi¬ 
 native geography of desire, Justine becomes a sexualized site on his 
 route to manhood—or, in Pursewarden’s rudely deflationary, and 
 characteristically misogynistic, rhetoric, “a tiresome old sexual turn¬ 
 stile through which presumably we [men] must all pass.” The degree 
 to which Justine serves as a stationary marker in Darley’s quest for 
 self-knowledge also raises the (appropriately Egyptian) specter of 
 the Sphinx who confronts the questing Oedipus with the riddle of 
 woman.^^ Both enigma and riddle, Justine becomes the text’s over¬ 
 determined symbol for the instability of truth and language in an 
 existential world—that belated and bitter knowledge awaiting all the 
 Quartet’s male seekers. As such, Durrell’s representation of Justine 
 forms a classic illustration of the phenomenon Alice Jardine labels 
 “gynesis,” the philosophical setting-into-motion of the concept of 
 woman as a symbol of the postmodern crisis.^® Darley colludes in this 
 process by making Justine’s “enigma” the raison d’etre of his own 
 text, but his words betray what is at stake for him, for all men, in 
 this maneuver: 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 85 
 
 There was no question of true or false. Nymph? Goddess? Vam¬ 
 pire? Yes, she was all of these and none of them. She was, like 
 every woman, everything that the mind of man (let us define 
 “man” as a poet . . .) wished to imagine. ... 1 began to realize 
 with awe the enormous reflexive power of woman.” 
 
 This conceptualizing of woman as man’s mirror/other points to an 
 even more suspect feature of Darley’s desires: namely, the degree to 
 which his projections onto Justine are narcissistic, mirroring, as Luce 
 Irigaray would say, the masculine back upon itself. And such male 
 worship of sameness begins to suggest the presence of a homoerotic 
 underside to Darley’s passion for Justine, and, indeed, to Durrell’s 
 plotting of male heterosexual desire.^® Hence Alexandria—elsewhere 
 feminized as “princess and whore”—is also figured as “a city of in¬ 
 cest,” in which the “lover mirrors himself [as] Narcissus.” Not only 
 does Darley meet and fall in love with Justine through her reflection 
 in a mirror; mirrors become the text’s metaphor for its own destabi¬ 
 lizing, multidimensional refractions of point of view. Darley begins 
 Justine by warning that the “symbolic lovers of the free Hellenic 
 world are replaced here by something different, something subtly 
 androgynous, inverted upon itself,” his use of the word androgyny 
 indicating a likeness that is narcissistic in its intimacy; and when 
 Darley speaks of those lovers who emerge from Alexandria’s “great 
 wine-press of love . . . deeply wounded in their sex,” he subcon¬ 
 sciously attests to the degree to which Alexandria’s mirror inversions 
 have undermined the security of his authority as removed, all-seeing 
 observer. The staged spectacle of Egyptian sexuality has become a 
 reflecting glass, “inverted upon itself,” for in a world of fluid bounda¬ 
 ries, he who gazes ultimately finds himself penetrated in turn by his 
 reflection in the Other.^‘ 
 
 Moreover, as the unsuccessful outcome of Darley’s affair with Jus¬ 
 tine indicates, he has reason to feel “wounded in [his] sex,” unsure 
 of his “masculine” status, and by extension, his heterosexual com¬ 
 petency. A curious impotence has dogged this would-be writer and 
 dazed voyeur ever since his arrival in Alexandria, leading him to ex¬ 
 perience a failure in all domains of feeling: “to write; even to make 
 
86 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 love.” His first Egyptian lover, the nightclub dancer Melissa, will 
 confess that “he never excited me like other men did.” And when 
 Justine sweeps Darley across the borderline of voyeuristic detach¬ 
 ment into the anarchy of her interior world, Darley assigns to himself 
 the grammatical position of passive object of her desire: “She had 
 achieved me.” It comes as no surprise that this “timid and scholarly 
 lover with chalk on his sleeve,” having left Alexandria for an island 
 retreat where he can lick his wounds in solitude, acquiesces with 
 hardly a word of protest to Balthazar’s charge (in the latter’s heavily 
 annotated and edited draft of the Justine manuscript) that the most 
 important love of Darley’s life has been a total sham. The fact that 
 Balthazar argues that Justine has used Darley as a “decoy” to conceal 
 her affair with Pursewarden—already Darley’s rival as a successful 
 novelist—only underlines Darley’s present authorial and psychic im¬ 
 passe. His entire framework of reality thus radically transformed, he 
 must begin the work of “learn[ing] to see it all with new eyes,” ac¬ 
 customing himself “to the truths which Balthazar has added,” among 
 which he seems to accept as a given the revelation of his “unman¬ 
 ning” at Justine’s hands.” 
 
 As Darley begins this process of reevaluation, a series of memories 
 and events repressed from Justine spontaneously rise to the surface 
 of his recording consciousness, making up the reader’s text of Bal¬ 
 thazar. And, tellingly, what each of these hitherto repressed “events” 
 obsessively reveals are less instances of Justine’s infidelity (which 
 we might expect from a deceived lover), than instances of Darley’s 
 own profound uncertainty about his status as a man and about the 
 nature of male sexuality in general. For the simple fact is that each 
 of these “returns of the repressed” engenders anxieties that cannot be 
 extricated from the pulsations of homoerotic desire. 
 
 It is no coincidence that Balthazar is named after the character whose 
 text—nicknamed the Interlinear—threatens the sexual and narrative 
 authority that Darley has attempted to establish over his passion by 
 writing Justine. Unexpectedly appearing on Darley’s island “like some 
 goat-like apparition from the Underworld,” sporting “dark Assyrian 
 ringlets and the beard of Pan,” Balthazar is the perfect guide to lead 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 87 
 
 Darley to the polymorphous realm of forbidden desire. Not insignifi¬ 
 cantly, he is also a lover of his own sex, as Darley should well know, 
 since he is “often” prone, he casually notes, to walk in unannounced 
 on Balthazar in bed with various sailors. If Balthazar is the first of a 
 series of homosexuals to flood the psychodramatically charged land¬ 
 scape of Balthazar, he is also the only man whose “inversion” Darley 
 claims to admire, since, in Darley’s view, it doesn’t compromise “his 
 innate masculinity of mind.” Darley’s phrasing is worth note: the pro¬ 
 noun “his” obviously refers to Balthazar, but like so much else that is 
 objectified as a third-person observation in this volume, the following 
 description could apply equally to its speaker; “innate masculinity of 
 mind” is precisely that which Darley wishes to claim for himself, as 
 well as that which Balthazar’s text has thrown into question. “And 
 so, slowly, reluctantly,” Darley writes at the end of the first chapter 
 of Balthazar, “I have been driven back to my starting-point. ... I 
 must set it all down, in cold black and white. . . . [T]he key I am 
 trying to turn is in myself.”” 
 
 Darley’s words prove more prophetic than he knows, for the seem¬ 
 ingly objective “facts” that he goes on to record in Balthazar are 
 indeed often hidden “keys” to himself. Nothing could make this 
 clearer than the series of four triggering events whereby the repressed 
 surfaces to rewrite the story of Justine: a recollected photograph, 
 the memory of a kiss, a religious festival, Carnival. As soon as Bal¬ 
 thazar leaves, Darley turns in chapter 2 to a photograph taken outside 
 Mnemjian’s barbershop, the hub of the Quartet’s male homosocial 
 world. Examining this random “text” for clues to that which he has 
 hitherto failed to see, Darley fixes on two figures, Toto de Brunei 
 and John Keats—characters who have gone totally unmentioned in 
 JustineJ'* First, he takes up the case of Toto, an aged and effemi¬ 
 nate homosexual whose marginal position in the photograph is tell¬ 
 ingly the reverse of Darley’s own: “And in one corner there I am, 
 in my shabby raincoat—the perfected image of a schoolteacher. In 
 the other corner sits poor little Toto de Brunei . . . the darling of old 
 society women too proud to pay for gigolos.” As we might suspect 
 from Darley’s condescending tone—which contrasts markedly with 
 his professed tolerance for Balthazar’s sexual practices—Toto has be¬ 
 come a projection of the speaker’s own inadequacies and uncertain 
 
88 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 self-image. For in serving as the “lapdog” of rich society women, 
 Toto’s position uncomfortably reminds Darley of the passive role he 
 has unconsciously assumed as Justine’s decoy. The fear of having been 
 emasculated by this experience only intensifies his virulent put-down 
 of Toto as a woman-identified man: “There was . . . nothing to be 
 done with him for he was a woman.’’” 
 
 Having thus trashed “poor little Toto,’’ Darley moves on to “poor 
 John Keats,” the newspaper correspondent who has snapped this 
 photograph. As the recording “eye” behind the camera lens, Keats 
 symbolically occupies the position of the invisible but all-knowing 
 author, until Darley quickly moves in to let us know better: “Once 
 he had wanted to be a writer but took the wrong turning.” Yet the 
 more Darley ridicules Keats’s counterproductive “mania to perpetu¬ 
 ate, to record, to photograph everything,” the more these traits begin 
 to sound suspiciously like Darley’s own; he, after all, is the blocked 
 writer whose failure to produce a novel is tied to his disabling belief 
 that he can contain everything within one frame of reference—which 
 Balthazar’s Interlinear, as a corrective to Justine, has already begun 
 to disprove. 
 
 As the inaugural event in Darley’s imaginative re-envisioning of 
 the past, then, it is no accident that his memory exhumes two fig¬ 
 ures who, respectively, illustrate the impasse of sexual and narrative 
 authority that has precipitated his own identity crisis. Both Toto and 
 Keats, furthermore, individually illustrate the inextricability of the 
 sexual and literary. Toto’s sexual perversion is reflected in his comic 
 perversion of language, for he speaks in “a Toto tongue of his own,” 
 composed of three languages, whose destabilizing logic subverts the 
 status quo by undermining the assumed relation between signifier and 
 signified: “whenever at a loss for a word he would put in one whose 
 meaning he did not know and the grotesque substitution was often 
 delightful. ... In it, he almost reached poetry.” A more orthodox 
 yoking of sexual potency and the power of the word occurs in Keats’s 
 case. For in Clea, this nondescript journalist undergoes a radical 
 transformation, returning from the war front not only a true writer 
 but a masculine sex symbol: so Darley learns when he finds his dou¬ 
 ble taking a shower in his bathroom, Keats’s body now the bronzed, 
 athletic physique of a “Greek god!” Yet as this telltale exclamation 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 89 
 
 suggests, even this now positive projection of Darley’s dual goals of 
 writerly and masculine authority is not without a homoerotic under¬ 
 tone that destabilizes its apparent signification, and this slippage 
 turns us back to the anxieties that keep surfacing to plague Darley 
 throughout Balthazar. 
 
 The last figure whom Darley recalls in Keats’s photograph, Scobie, 
 brings to the plane of consciousness more thoughts of sexual and lin¬ 
 guistic perversion. Nothing could be more authentic, Darley assures 
 us, than this colorful ex-sailor and befuddled employee of the Egyp¬ 
 tian secret police, who has “the comprehensibility of a diagram— 
 plain as a national anthem.” Yet, curiously, Darley’s train of thought 
 reveals that this old friend’s signifying capacities are not so appar¬ 
 ent after all: he immediately recalls the day Scobie confesses to him 
 that he has “Tendencies” for which he is not “fully Answerable”— 
 namely, that he is a “Peddyrast.” In exile from a puritanical England 
 which has not appreciated his zeal as a scoutmaster, Scobie has found 
 a paradise for his proclivities in the colonized Orient: “Looking from 
 east to west over this fertile Delta what do I see?” Scobie rhapso¬ 
 dizes in words that recall Maxime du Camp’s excitement upon land¬ 
 ing in Egypt with Flaubert, “Mile upon mile of angelic little black 
 bottoms.”’* Nothing could better uncover the ambiguous sexual poli¬ 
 tics of Durrell’s colonial narrative than Scobie’s wording: beneath 
 the sexual allure of the Orient’s “fertile Delta”—age-old symbol for 
 female fecundity—there lurks a hidden penchant for boys’ “black 
 bottoms.”’^ Scobie’s transgressive tastes, however, do not stop with 
 boys: with the lyrics of a popular jazz melody, “Old Tiresias,” drift¬ 
 ing in the background, the old man confesses that he doesn’t mind 
 “slip[ping into] female duds . . . when the Fleet’s in.” The frighten¬ 
 ingly swift and altogether convincing transformation of Scobie into “a 
 veritable Tuppenny Upright” that follows exposes Darley to another 
 slippage in signification that, by analogy, raises the haunting possi¬ 
 bility of his own metaphoric undoing. Moreover, as in Toto’s case, 
 this destabilization in sexual meaning is marked by a subversion of 
 linguistic content; Scobie speaks in so arcane a dialect that his verbal 
 perversions necessitate a glossary at the end of the volume. 
 
 The manner in which being metaphorically “unmanned” or female- 
 identified may vitiate one’s artistic powers becomes the subject of 
 
90 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 Darky’s thoughts even more explicitly in the next chapter, as Bal¬ 
 thazar’s reconstructed text forces him to travel back in memory to 
 the inception of Justine’s lesbian affair with the artist Clea. This is 
 another known “event” that is all but absent from Justine, since it runs 
 counter to Darky’s romanticizing vision of his and Justine’s hetero¬ 
 sexual passion. “Distasteful” as Darky claims to find “this subject- 
 matter,” he now dwells on the affair at length, and for reasons not 
 merely voyeuristic. First, because the women’s lovemaking literally 
 “interrupt[s]” Cka’s artistry, her kisses “[falling] where the painter’s 
 wet brush should have fallen,” this tableau serves as a cautionary fable 
 for one whose own creative productivity has been blocked by his love 
 for Justine. Second, Cka’s break with Justine provides Darky with a 
 model for avoiding inappropriate desires—the homosexuality that he 
 denigrates as “the consuming shape of a sterile love”—and this model 
 is particularly relevant given that Clea becomes Darky’s ideal female 
 love object in the final volume of the Quartet. Hence Darky subcon¬ 
 sciously depicts Cka’s experience as the complementary inverse of 
 his own: her naive brush with lesbianism proves “that relationships 
 like these did not answer the needs of her nature,” that “she was a 
 woman at last and belonged to men.” This investment in maintaining 
 Cka’s “innocence” attests to the strength of Darky’s pressing need to 
 establish his own “innocence,” his untainted masculine integrity, in 
 the midst of the sexual “perversions” that increasingly surround him, 
 threatening the presumed “needs of [his own] nature.”^® 
 
 Given the welling-up of all the forbidden desires represented by 
 Balthazar, Toto, Scobie, and company, it is fascinating to turn to 
 the next “repressed” event reported for the first time in Balthazar. 
 This involves chapter 7’s long account of the orgiastic mulid (or 
 religious festival) of Sitna Mariam, whose dreamlike atmosphere 1 
 have already cited. It only takes a few jotted words in Balthazar’s 
 Interlinear—“So Narouz decided to act ’’—-to “detonate” in Darky’s 
 “imagination” his version of Narouz’s movements through the night¬ 
 time festival, which reads as if it were an excerpt from a third-person 
 omniscient narration. What this attempt at narrative distancing fails 
 to conceal, however, is that the sensations attributed to Narouz, the 
 “desires engendered in the forests of the mind,” are actually projec¬ 
 tions, once again, of Darky’s own psyche.^’ 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 91 
 
 But why does Darley choose Narouz to “stand in” as actor in his 
 own imaginative fantasy? Because, it turns out, Narouz in many ways 
 embodies Darley’s ideal of masculinity. Clad in loose peasant clothes 
 that “expos[e] arms and hands of great power covered by curly dark 
 hair,” possessed of a powerful body that emanates “a sensation of 
 overwhelming strength,” Narouz epitomizes a kind of untamed, sen¬ 
 sual virility. This is a man who can easily, not to say sadistically, 
 dismember animals with one crack of his whip, and who, D. H. 
 Lawrence-like, experiences delirious orgasm when breaking in a wild 
 horse. Narouz’s unrequited love for Clea reinforces his function as 
 Darley’s heterosexual role model, outlining the proper route for the 
 latter’s wayward drives. From Darley’s narrating perspective, then, 
 Narouz looms, in perhaps too many senses of the word, as a man’s 
 man—so much so, in fact, that an ambiguously homoerotic element 
 begins to infiltrate the narrator’s appreciative descriptions of one 
 who, after all, is supposed to be his guide to heterosexual fulfillment. 
 Not only might Darley’s lingering evocation of Narouz’s orgasm on 
 horseback sound slightly suspect, but the muted feminization of his 
 subject that infiltrates his description of Narouz’s “splendid” eyes, “of 
 a blueness and innocence that made them almost like Clea’s,” along 
 with the “deep and thrilling . . . magic of a woman’s contralto” that 
 he reads into his voice, points—as in Flaubert—to an erotic intensity 
 just barely contained by the appeal to sexual difference. Masculine 
 heterosexuality, once again, is contaminated by its proximity to the 
 homoerotic. The one flaw in Narouz’s appearance, the harelip that he 
 considers his “dark star,” might seem to run counter to this coded lan¬ 
 guage of attraction, until we remember that Flaubert also emphasizes 
 the facial “ugliness” of his (male) objects of desire: in the colonial 
 narrative, a degree of ugliness, as Sander L. Gilman has argued in re¬ 
 gard to representations of Africa, becomes a signifier, paradoxically, 
 of sexual availability 
 
 That there is more going on here than first meets the eye is con¬ 
 firmed in Darley’s evocation of Narouz’s night odyssey through the 
 festival grounds. Narouz’s movements culminate, finally, in his fever¬ 
 ish intercourse with an aged, fat prostitute, in whose voice and body 
 he imagines Clea’s presence. “A voice spoke out of the shadows at his 
 side—a voice whose sweetness and depth could belong to one person 
 
92 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 only: Clea. . . . The voice was the voice of the woman he loved but it 
 came from a hideous form, seated in half-shadow—the grease-folded 
 body of a Moslem woman. . . . Blind now to everything but the ca¬ 
 dences of the voice he followed her like an addict.”"" Having entered a 
 mutable and sightless realm where sexuality takes all forms, Narouz 
 in effect creates his own desired love object out of this amorphous 
 and anonymous body, embuing the prostitute with his disembodied 
 desires for Clea. When we remember that Narouz’s perceptions are 
 being hypothesized by the narrating Darley, this moment becomes 
 absolutely crucial in illuminating the stakes involved in this text’s 
 constitution of male sexual identity. For what this encounter reveals 
 about the nature of sexual attraction is the fact that all desire is un¬ 
 fixed, or, to put it in Freud’s terms, that there is no necessary link 
 between sexual instinct and object choice: the only “natural” ob¬ 
 jects of our desires are those that our fantasies construct. In practical 
 terms, Narouz’s example teaches Darley the freedom of choice that 
 is his: he too can put his love for Justine aside and redirect his desire 
 to a more “appropriate” object choice. What Balthazar has said in 
 praise of homosexual relations—“Sex has left the body and entered 
 the imagination now”—turns out to be true of all negotiations of 
 desire 
 
 And Darley should know something about the constructed nature 
 of sexual fantasy, because—in yet another of this text’s revelations 
 of repressed knowledge—it turns out that he has not only been a par¬ 
 ticipant in this festival, he has witnessed Narouz’s copulation with 
 the prostitute firsthand: “my memory revives something which it had 
 forgotten; memories of a dirty booth with a man and woman lying 
 together in a bed and myself looking down at them, half-drunk, wait¬ 
 ing my turn.” Waiting his turn, that is, to do the same as Narouz, 
 and spend the image of his lost love for Justine on this nameless 
 body: which also means waiting his turn to take Narouz’s place, 
 to become his eroticized masculine ideal, a “real” man. Unless, of 
 course, Darley means to take the place of the prostitute, to be with 
 rather than become his ideal—a possibility which returns us to the 
 sexual ambiguities that have plagued Darley’s quest for manhood 
 throughout."'^ Darley’s voyeuristic tendencies, one recalls, are espe¬ 
 cially acute when it comes to spectacles of male sensuality: visiting 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 93 
 
 Balthazar in bed with his boyfriends: walking in on Keats’s newly 
 godlike body under the shower; and, now, interrupting Narouz’s or¬ 
 gasm. Given these recurrences, it no longer suffices to explain (away) 
 Darley’s obsessive thoughts of homosexual taint solely as an inter¬ 
 nalized reaction to his “failure” as Justine’s lover; it becomes more 
 and more clear that he also actively searches out that which he fears 
 because it speaks to his unspoken desires. 
 
 Thus it is ironically but psychologically appropriate that the wel¬ 
 ter of polymorphous desires unleashed by Darley’s vivid recreation of 
 the mulid of Sitna Mariam is immediately set against an account of 
 Scobie’s murder (which occurs earlier in narrative time) at the begin¬ 
 ning of chapter 8 . Cruising the docks in his female clothes, the genial 
 old “Peddyrast” is brutally kicked to death in an evident case of fag¬ 
 bashing. In so manipulating the sequential order of his text, Darley 
 subconsciously uses his narrative authority to serve warning on his 
 analogous potential for perversity: not only do Scobie’s “Tendencies” 
 catch up with the old sailor, but the latent desires that Darley’s 
 account of Narouz have expressed have also been, if not literally 
 punished, at least overwritten. This report of homophobic violence 
 prefigures the psychodramatic climax of Balthazar —the Carnival ball 
 during which the effeminate Toto de Brunei is discovered brutally 
 murdered, his head run through with a hatpin—^yet another of the 
 events deliberately suppressed from Justine’s text, as Darley himself 
 admits. “Why have 1 never [before] mentioned this [incident]? . . . 
 1 was even there at the time, and yet somehow the whole incident 
 . . . escaped me in the press of other matters. . . . Nevertheless, it is 
 strange that 1 should not have mentioned it, even in passing.” 
 
 Even more so than the mad jumble of color, sounds, and human 
 grotesques characterizing the festival of Sitna Mariam, Alexandria’s 
 celebration of Carnival assumes the contours of a Freudian dream- 
 work. “The dark tides of Eros . . . burst out . . . like something long 
 dammed up and raise the forms of strange primeval creatures—the 
 perversions,” Darley says, noting how “the polymorphous desires of 
 the city” well up “like patches of meaning in an obscure text.” The 
 “ruling spirit” of this three-day-long debauch, Darley continues, is 
 “utter anonymity,” in which the black costumes and dominos donned 
 by the participants become “the outward symbols of our own secret 
 
94 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 minds,” “shroud[ing] identity and sex,” blurring the boundaries “be¬ 
 tween man and woman, wife and lover, friend and enemy.” In this 
 world of dissolving boundaries, of unmoored sexuality and identity, 
 Darley finds an exhilarating freedom implicitly related to the taboo 
 subject that has haunted him throughout Balthazar: 
 
 One feels free in this disguise to do whatever one likes without 
 prohibition. . . . [W]e are delivered from the thrall of personality, 
 from the bondage of ourselves. . . . You cannot tell whether you 
 are dancing with a man or a woman. . . . Yes, who can help but 
 love carnival when ... all crimes [are] expiated or committed, all 
 illicit desires sated . . . without the penalties which conscience 
 or society exact? 
 
 To do whatever one likes, for Darley, seems intimately connected to 
 the pleasure of, just perhaps, finding oneself dancing with a mem¬ 
 ber of the same sex. But if Carnival, through its exteriorization of 
 internal desire, seems to make possible the unthinkable by temporar¬ 
 ily escaping the socially repressive law of prohibition, penalties, and 
 conscience, the festival is also, simultaneously, the siting for a much 
 more ambiguous reenforcement of repression: it is against this ambi¬ 
 sexual backdrop that the costumed Toto, Darley’s negative alter ego, 
 meets his doom. The satiation of “illicit desires” also exacts its price. 
 
 Significantly, Toto is mistaken for Justine when he is killed; on 
 the way to the Cervoni ball, Justine has given him her well-known 
 intaglio ring to wear, so that she can slip away from the ball unob¬ 
 served, granting him in the meantime “a miracle long desired: . . . 
 to be turned from a man into a woman.”The unintended result 
 of this substitution assumes several levels of meaning: metaphori¬ 
 cally, it enacts the death of the feminized or “unmanned” man that 
 Darley has feared becoming, while, literally, it marks the death of 
 a scapegoat for Justine herself, the negative love object who has en¬ 
 gendered his self-doubts. But the death of Toto also symbolizes the 
 scapegoating of Darley’s homosexual impulses. For just as significant 
 as the fact that Toto dies wearing Justine’s ring is the fact that she 
 has marked his black sleeve with white chalk so that she may iden¬ 
 tify him among the other costumed revelers. Crucially this signifying 
 mark echoes an image that the narrating Darley has already gener- 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 95 
 
 ated to identify himself as “this timid and scholarly lover with chalk 
 on his sleeve.” Toto is not only Darley’s negative foil, not only a scape¬ 
 goat for Justine, but a double or mirror—in this world of incestuously 
 multiplying mirrors—of Darley himself. 
 
 And who is it that kills Toto? None other, of course, than Narouz, 
 the male principle incarnate. In the act of narrating Toto’s death, 
 therefore, Darley allows his hypermasculine double (Narouz) to as¬ 
 sert itself by slaying his feminine self-image (Toto) and with it the 
 specter of his guilty homoerotic desires. This purgation allows Darley 
 to begin to reorient himself as a sexual being and an artist, as the 
 rest of the Quartet demonstrates. The primary male heterosexual 
 task, Durrell would appear to be saying, is to create a love object 
 appropriate to one’s desired self-image. But such a goal involves sev¬ 
 eral paradoxes. For that which Darley is exorcising is any expression 
 of the polymorphous play, the slippages in signification, that Carni¬ 
 val (like the tent-city episode preceding it) has revealed to be the 
 underlying “truth” of all sexual desire. Without Carnival’s reign of 
 anarchy, this knowledge would never have occurred to Darley, nor 
 would this symbolic exorcism have been possible. Moreover, to the 
 degree that Darley’s male ideal, Narouz, is responsible for slaying his 
 effeminate self, Darley’s narration achieves a perversely metaphoric 
 union with the covert object of his desire in spite of himself: Toto/ 
 Darley gets “pinned” by Narouz after all. In “hunting from room to 
 room . . . for an identifiable object to direct our love,” as Darley says 
 of the Carnival revelers, we find that there are no “destined” objects 
 except those we construct—or those we choose to kill. 
 
 The quintessential Carnival story of unmasked true love, interest¬ 
 ingly enough, turns out to be all about the (quite literal) construc¬ 
 tion of one’s desired sexual object, and as such it sheds light on 
 Durrell’s resolution to his protagonist’s anxieties in the final book of 
 the Quartet. It is at Carnival that the doctor Amaril falls “madly in 
 love” with a masked lady who disappears without leaving her name; 
 the next year, Amaril meets her again, and after a frenzied pursuit, 
 strips her of her mask, only to learn she has no nose. Undeterred by 
 this revelation, Amaril uses his surgical skills to reconstruct a nose 
 
96 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 for his beloved—in effect, to replace her lack with his own phallic 
 projections. As Clea, who tells this fable, notes, “You see, he [was] 
 after all building a woman of his own fancy. . . . Only Pygmalion 
 had such a chance before!” Once Amaril has successfully “authored” 
 this “lovely nose,” he bestows on his bride a very special wedding 
 present: a doll’s surgery, where she can repair children’s wounded 
 dolls, static Galateas like herself, the rest of her life. “ ‘It is the only 
 way,’ says Amaril, ‘to hold a really stupid woman you adore. Give 
 her something of her own to do.’ 
 
 It is most fitting that Clea narrates this story: not only has she 
 helped Amaril engineer Semira’s transformation by sketching models 
 for the new nose, but Semira’s fate will become Clea’s own. As I’ve 
 already mentioned, Clea details Darley’s return to Alexandria and 
 the self-confidence that he gains as he lays to rest Justine’s danger¬ 
 ously Oriental allure and then redirects his sexual energies toward 
 the serenely virginal, blond beauty of Clea. To become a part of this 
 text’s economy of male desire, however, Clea must first be remade 
 by man in his image, no matter how perfect she may appear to be, 
 and this symbolic act of rebirth forms the Quartet’s symbolically 
 charged climax. Darley and Clea have been swimming underwater 
 when Clea’s hand is accidentally harpooned to a submerged wreck. 
 Unable to free the harpoon, Darley is forced to hack Clea’s arm off 
 with a knife, and then, on shore, pump her nearly drowned body back 
 to life (she gasps for air like “a newly born child”) in a grotesque 
 “simulacrum of the sexual act—life saving, life-giving.”''® Not sur¬ 
 prisingly, even Durrell’s most ardent supporters have had problems 
 justifying the heavy-handed construction of this scene. Rather than 
 “justify” Durrell’s execution, 1 would suggest its inevitability, given 
 his unfolding theme. The acute strain that the text evinces at this 
 juncture has everything to do with the difficulty (and desperation) 
 involved in the attempt of his male subject, Darley, to construct a 
 properly heterosexual object of desire. 
 
 Durrell’s symbolism, indeed, is painfully obvious; not only is Clea 
 pinioned by one phallic object and castrated by another, not only 
 does a simulated sex act by a man bring her back to life, but it is her 
 painter’s arm—her means of independent creative productivity—that 
 she loses: the “necessary sacrifice of a useless member,” according 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 97 
 
 to one critic/® In turn, Darley’s role in reanimating Clea transforms 
 him into a Pygmalion-like “life-giver” whose powers of creation, in 
 “reversing the sexuality of birth,” thereby subsume the threat that 
 women’s reproductive powers—like Egypt’s emblematic fecundity— 
 have traditionally posed to the questing male/® This series of iden¬ 
 tifications is cinched by the fact that it is none other than Amaril 
 who treats the wounded Clea, replacing her missing hand with a me¬ 
 chanical one that, damningly, paints even better than her original: 
 her creativity is rendered a product of male instrumentality. Simul¬ 
 taneously, Clea reveals that Amaril was the unnamed lover to whom 
 she has earlier lost her virginity, thus “turn[ing]” her “into a woman” 
 emotionally and sexually ready for Darley’s advances. “1 suppose I 
 was even a bit eager to be wounded,” she says of her sexual initiation, 
 and wounded she indeed becomes in this final bit of psychodrama. 
 Durrell’s narrative, in effect, has (forcibly) fashioned an object that 
 answers to Darley’s desired self-image as a heterosexually competent 
 man: via the agency of Greek myth, a perfect (and perfectly West¬ 
 ern) mate is born from his foray into the dangerously torrid zone of 
 mid-Eastern sexuality. 
 
 But in order to construct his female counterpart, Darley must first 
 refashion his own self-image, a process which returns us to the sexual 
 ambiguities that have marked his negotiations of masculine subjec¬ 
 tivity throughout the Quartet. Just as Darley’s internalized doubts 
 have been expressed through externalized self-projections, so too a 
 double figure becomes the measure of his potential for self-fashioning: 
 in this case, the hack journalist Johnny Keats, recently returned to 
 Alexandria from the front (World War II has commenced) newly 
 metamorphosed: “And . . . you know what? The most unaccountable 
 and baffling thing. [War] has made a man of me, as the saying goes. 
 More, a writer! ... I have begun it at last, that bloody joyful book 
 of mine.” If Keats can undergo such a sea-change, there would seem 
 to be hope for Darley yet. Keats’s doubling function also explains 
 his pronouncement that he considers himself a competitor for Clea: 
 manhood, writing, and wooing Clea seem one and the same in the 
 world created by this text. But the actual moment of re-encounter 
 between Darley and his double unleashes an extraneous erotic energy 
 that belies the assumed coherency of this formula. This scene, briefly 
 
98 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 noted earlier, occurs when Darley returns to his old apartment to 
 find Keats in the shower: “Under the shower stood a Greek god! I 
 was so surprised at the transformation that I sat down abruptly on 
 the lavatory and studied this . . . apparition. Keats was burnt almost 
 black, and his hair had bleached white. Though slimmer, he looked 
 in first-class physical condition.” While Keats dries himself, the two 
 men make conversation: 
 
 “God, this water is a treat. I’ve been revelling.” 
 
 “You look in tremendous shape.” 
 
 “I am. I am.” He smacked himself exuberantly on the buttocks. 
 
 . . . “You look in quite good shape, too,” he said, and his blue 
 eyes twinkled with a new mischievous light.” 
 
 Taken out of context, this exchange might seem more the prelude 
 to a soft-porn scene in a gay novel by Gordon Merrick than the en¬ 
 counter of a straight hero with his role model. For under Darley’s 
 intense gaze, Keats becomes as much an object of consumption, a 
 living spectacle, as the dancer Hasan el-Belbeissi has been for Flau¬ 
 bert (whose reaction is equally surprised but delighted, his prefactory 
 “Oh! Oh! Oh!” mirrored in Darley’s “Greek god!” exclamation). But 
 there is a significant difference between these two eroticized objects: 
 this new-born Adonis is as unmistakably English as the Pygmalion- 
 like artist whose vision metaphorically creates him. Just as Justine’s 
 dark exoticism has been replaced with Clea’s rational clarity, the 
 swarthy foreignness of Darley’s former male ideal Narouz—murdered 
 at the climax of Mountolive —is overwritten by a newly fantasized 
 masculine self-image whose Aryan good looks perfectly complement 
 Clea’s own. Yet even the retreat from Oriental sexuality implicit in 
 this pair of substitutions cannot completely eradicate the homoerotic 
 possibility—or threat—that Egypt has already unlocked in the nar¬ 
 rator’s psyche. It is thus inevitable that Keats dies in battle almost 
 immediately after this encounter; not only does his death free Darley 
 to become the new Keats, as it were, it also insures that those lin¬ 
 gering glances in the bathroom go no further. In death, Keats joins 
 those other silenced signifiers of homoerotic taboo—Toto, Scobie, 
 and Narouz. Within the world of Durrell’s imaginary, the price of 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 99 
 
 masculine subjectivity is that of killing off the very desires that make 
 such a construction a pressing, immediate necessity. 
 
 Given the impact of this restructuring imperative on the psycho- 
 dramatic level of character, it is reasonable to wonder what effects 
 it has on the narrative’s formal trajectories of desire. Clea includes 
 a vignette that offers a metaphoric answer. In Darley’s last walk 
 about town on the eve of his final departure from Alexandria, he 
 comes across a religious procession that echoes the Sitna Mariam and 
 Carnival scenes in Balthazar. But the erotic and ecstatic energies of 
 those events have been subtly homogenized, routed into one linear 
 trajectory, in this reprise: “And to all this queer discontinuous and 
 yet somehow congruent mass of humanity the music lent a sort of 
 homogeneity; it bound it and confined it. . . . [CJircling, proceeding, 
 halting, the long dancing lines moved on towards the tomb, bursting 
 through the great portals . . . like a tide at full.’’” This channeling of 
 the many tributaries of desire into one massive tide not only uncan¬ 
 nily recalls Freud’s description of the way sexual instincts are brought 
 into the service of a single drive but also inscribes the physiologi¬ 
 cal process of male orgasm. And with this climactic ejaculation, the 
 hitherto dispersive energies of this multilayered text are “bound and 
 confined’’ within a specifically phallocentric model of narrative that 
 has little to do with the polymorphous freeplay Durrell has hitherto 
 promoted. Ironically, the goal, the aim of the processional, is Scobie’s 
 former lodging: this lecherous old Tiresias has been resurrected by the 
 Moslem population of his quarter as El Scob, a fertility god to whom 
 barren women pray. With this rewriting of the very type of male 
 sexual ambiguity into an emblem of heterosexual productivity, the 
 narrative’s homogenizing of its deviant impulses would seem to have 
 finally cleared the way for Darley, now the writer par excellence, to 
 produce, at long last, his “man-size” masterpiece. 
 
 So how does the artist feel, proverbial pen in hand and facing the 
 blank page? “[LJike some timid girl, scared of the birth of her first 
 child.”” Perhaps this return of the feminine whereby Darley identifies 
 himself as a “her” is only a joke, or a slip of the tongue, or an asser¬ 
 tion of mastery over his former anxieties; nonetheless, this age-old 
 conflation of masculine artistic productivity and female reproduc- 
 
100 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 tivity betrays the shadow of a fear that lingers to disturb Barley’s 
 newborn confidence. Perhaps he should join the barren wives who 
 pray to El Scob for succor. 
 
 This welter of contradictions brings us back to the male writer’s 
 problematic relation to phallocentric discourse, in this case exac¬ 
 erbated and illuminated by the sexual and representational politics 
 of the colonial narrative. For Burrell is attracted to Alexandria as 
 the locus of his narrative precisely because its exotic, foreign other¬ 
 ness allows him to indulge in fantasies of, as Said puts it, “a differ¬ 
 ent type of sexuality”—certainly one more open, in Flaubert’s noun, 
 to “experiment.” Likewise, the polyphonic execution of this work 
 evokes a geography of the instincts at least temporarily freed from 
 constrictions of time and space and, to the writing Western con¬ 
 sciousness, from sexual/moral orthodoxy. But such representations 
 of foreign sensuality and freeplay, for all their appeal, simultaneously 
 prove unnerving because they expose the contradictions and incoher¬ 
 encies underlying Western culture’s plots of masculine maturation 
 and articulation. Hence Barley’s compulsion to code the “possible” 
 as “homosexual,” the absolute antithesis of Western manhood, and 
 hence his impulse to colonize these fantasies by equating them with 
 the “feminine,” thereby categorizing their difference within familiar 
 hierarchical terms that allow him to pretend to have control over 
 their subversive attraction. 
 
 But this desire to control, to pin down as one thing and not the 
 other, is also what the Quartet, with its paean to the relativity of all 
 truths and its repeated illustrations of the slipperiness of all significa¬ 
 tion, works to counter. For if the multiple, overlapping perspectives 
 engendered by the Quartet’s refracting linguistic and formal struc¬ 
 tures are meant to suggest the subjectivity of all viewpoints, so too 
 its evocations of the Alexandrian nightworld of the festival and Car¬ 
 nival are meant to suggest that the only truth of sexuality and sexual 
 identification is its similarly fluid and individually constructed na¬ 
 ture. The irony, then, is that Barley’s discovery of the arbitrariness of 
 sexual choice, and the role that imagination plays in creating any ob- 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 101 
 
 ject of desire, makes all the more urgent his formulation of a choice 
 toward sexual fixity, toward an absolutism of heterosexual identifi¬ 
 cation and, as it were, “straightforward” artistic productivity. Thus 
 Clea ends with an exchange of letters between Darley and Clea, let¬ 
 ters tremulous with the anticipation of a not-too-distant reunion on 
 safe European soil, followed, on the last page, with the narrator’s 
 declaration that he has just penned the first words of his long-deferred 
 novel: “Once upon a time. . . .” At this moment, with Clea practi¬ 
 cally in his arms, Darley has become the apotheosis of the Western 
 writer, and the East his safely colonized other, whose perversities he 
 can survey from the authorizing distance of myth and fairy tale. 
 
 The catch, though, is that Clea really isn’t in Darley’s arms. De¬ 
 spite the fact Darley has begun to write, his romantic desires re¬ 
 main in a state of suspension; the concluding exchange of letters 
 gives an illusion of romantic closure where none exists. And with 
 this image of Clea writing from Paris and Darley writing from his 
 island retreat, 1 inevitably call to mind two other writing couples for 
 whom correspondence whets rather than consummates desire: Miller 
 in Paris, Durrell on one of his Mediterranean islands; Elaubert in 
 Egypt, Bouilhet back home in Erance.” 1 return to this latter pair and 
 Elaubert’s epistolary comment after describing sex with the exotic 
 dancer Kuchuk Hanem: 
 
 In my absorption in all those things, mon pauvre vieux, you 
 never ceased to be present. The thought of you was like a con¬ 
 stant vesicant, inflaming my mind and making its juices flow by 
 adding to the stimulation. 1 was sorry (the word is weak) that 
 you were not there—1 enjoyed it all for myself and for you—the 
 excitement was for both of us, and you came in for a good share, 
 you may be sure.^^ 
 
 In this example of male homosocial desire at its most crystalline, 
 Kuchuk’s sexualized body primarily serves to bond the two corre¬ 
 spondents: as she stimulates Elaubert’s bodily parts, his mind is in¬ 
 flamed by thoughts of Bouilhet. This latter is the ultimate in safe sex, 
 since minds, however “juiced” to overflowing, aren’t the same as real 
 bodies. But what happens when the female intermediary is removed 
 
102 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 from the fantasized tableau? We get a glimpse of such a possibility in 
 the conclusion of the letter in which Flaubert tells Bouilhet all about 
 the sodomitical practices of his fellow Egyptians: 
 
 Dear fellow how I’d love to hug you—I’ll be glad to see your 
 face again. ... At night when you are in your room and the 
 lines don’t come, and you’re thinking of me, and bored, with 
 your elbows on the table, take a sheet of paper and write me 
 everything—I devoured your letter and have reread it more than 
 once. At this moment I have a vision of you in your shirt before 
 the fire, feeling too warm, and contemplating your prick.^ 
 
 Whatever one may want to argue about Flaubert’s tone or his “true” 
 sexual preference, this letter inscribes the body of a homosexual 
 rather than merely homosocial desire—mental vesicants have been 
 replaced by warm pricks. Nonetheless, the framework in which Flau¬ 
 bert encases this masturbatory scenario presupposes a relation of 
 writing to sexuality as potentially disabling as that which gener¬ 
 ates Darley’s crisis of masculinity in the Quartet. For Flaubert must 
 first represent the homoerotic revery as that which takes place when 
 “the lines don’t come,” when Bouilhet is “bored” with his poetry and 
 abdicates pen for prick: so too the homoerotics of the Quartet literally 
 take place between the lines, precisely because the exotic otherness 
 of sexual “perversion” is figured as the threat of erasure, the negation 
 of artistic vitality or “sap.” Thus in his journal Flaubert will use non- 
 reproductive sexual play as a metaphor to express his despair at not 
 having yet achieved his writing goals: “Where is the heart, the verve, 
 the sap? . . . We’re good at sucking, we play a lot of tongue-games, 
 we pet for hours: but—the real thing! To ejaculate, beget the child!” 
 Against this phallocentric model of narrative creation, in which the 
 pen is the penis only if the desire is heterosexually productive, the 
 substance of the narrative that Flaubert relays to Bouilhet simultane¬ 
 ously speaks another story, however. For the erotic tableau he unfolds 
 is, first of all, of writing—“take a sheet of paper and write," —and, 
 second, on Flaubert’s part, it has taken the form of writing: “At this 
 moment,” he writes, “I have a vision of you.” That which takes place 
 between the lines, as in Durrell’s case, or when the lines don’t come, 
 as in Flaubert’s, writes itself into the text nonetheless, engendering 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 103 
 
 a discourse of “foreign otherness” that is always already inscribed in 
 its denial. In the case of the Alexandria Quartet, the sheer effort of 
 Darley’s attempt to construct a nonperverse, “productive” model of 
 sexuality and narrativity, underlining the extremity of the masculine 
 anxiety that at once drives and undercuts his story, ends up only 
 clearing space for the play of the desires it (in both senses of the term) 
 writes out. Meanwhile Darley corresponds expectantly with Clea in 
 Paris, and Clea replies in kind, serenely awaiting a consummation 
 that never comes; and in the gap between these two lovers, one the 
 constructed mirror-projection of the other, exists an other “other” 
 that will not disappear from this text’s mappings and remappings of 
 the problematic terrain of male desire. 
 
 Notes 
 
 I would like to express my gratitude to Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland for 
 generously allowing this essay, which was written for their exciting new collection, 
 Escaping Patriarchy: Male Writing and Feminist Inquiry (1989), to appear first in this 
 issue. 
 
 1 R. T. Chapman, "Dead, or Just Pretending?; Reality in the Alexandria Quartet." 
 Centennial Review 16 (Fall 1972): 412. 
 
 2 “The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love,” Durrell states 
 in an explanatory note at the beginning of Balthazar (New York, 1961). The series 
 was first published by E. P. Dutton: Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive 
 (1959), and Clea (i960). I will be citing the Pocket edition of the Quartet (New 
 York, 1961) throughout. 
 
 3 Lawrence Durrell—Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence, ed. George Wickes 
 (New York, 1963), 4-5. Durrell repeats the phrase “man-size” twice in his letter. 
 
 4 Durrell, Clea, 130. 
 
 5 Wickes, ed.. Private Correspondence, 90. 
 
 6 Morton P. Levitt, “Art and Correspondences: Durrell, Miller, and The Alexandria 
 Quartet," Modern Fiction Studies 13 (Autumn 1967): 302. 
 
 7 Wickes, ed.. Private Correspondence. 89-90. Durrell has been mocking the English 
 tendency to self-deprecation, which, he jokes, he can do as well as anyone, and 
 then gives this example: “1 part my hair in the middle, adjust the horn rimmed 
 lenses and settle like a Catholic homosexual at the master’s feet” (89); he seems 
 to remain blissfully unaware of the parallels that might be drawn between this 
 image and his expression of literary discipleship which follows. 
 
 8 Ibid., 189-90; emphasis mine. 
 
 9 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial 
 Desire (New York, 1985). 
 
104 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 10 Lawrence Durrell, The Big Supposer: A Dialogue with Marc Alyn, trans. Francine 
 Barker (New York, 1974), 130. As Jane L. Pinchin pithily comments in “Durrell’s 
 Fatal Cleopatra,” Modern Fiction Studies 28 (Summer 1982), apropos this world of 
 male camaraderie, “Prostitutes, for Durrell ... are places men go to play with one 
 another” (231). 
 
 11 jane L. Pinchin, Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy (Princeton, 1977), 
 174 - 
 
 12 G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Study (London, 1968), 19. 
 
 13 See Pinchin’s comments in “Fatal Cleopatra,” an acute exegesis of the way in 
 which women become pawns in what is an essentially homosocial world of male 
 bonding: writing in 1982 before Sedgwick coined the term “homosocial,” Pinchin 
 comes to conclusions very similar to those advanced in Between Men. 
 
 14 I borrow this term from Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), where it 
 appears in the title of sec. 2, chap, i. 
 
 15 Durrell, Justine, 177: Balthazar, 235. 
 
 16 The impress of modernist aesthetic is most directly felt in Durrell’s first major 
 novel. The Black Book (1938; reprint New York, 1962): see also his A Key to 
 Modern British Poetry (Norman, Ok., 1952). In the prefatoiy note to Balthazar he 
 makes explicit his innovative agenda. 
 
 17 Durrell, Balthazar, 147, 149. 
 
 18 Ibid., 196, 185. 
 
 19 Said, Orientalism, i, 56, 188, 190. Durrell’s position vis-a-vis colonialism is rele¬ 
 vant here: although he claims “I don’t give a damn about British Empire,” he 
 allows himself to be labeled a “colonialist,” having been born and raised in India 
 in a family whose Anglo-Indian roots go back three generations. See Joan Gou- 
 lianos, “A Conversation with Lawrence Durrell about Art, Analysis, and Politics,” 
 Modern Fiction Studies 17 (Summer 1971): 164-65. 
 
 20 Said, Orientalism, 103, 187-88. 
 
 21 Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Chi¬ 
 cago, 1979), 83-84: emphasis mine. 
 
 22 Durrell, Balthazar, 149-50. 
 
 23 See Steegmuller, ed., Flaubert in Egypt, 203-4, as well as 62-63, 85-86, 89, 127, 
 133-34, 146, 150, for Flaubert’s accounts of repeated “experiments.” Of Flaubert’s 
 declaration that he has “consummated that business at the baths,” Steegmuller 
 notes the elaborate extremes to which Jean-Paul Sartre has gone in his study of 
 Flaubert, L’idiot de la famille, to prove all this homosexual jesting is merely that— 
 locker-room banter. As Steegmuller notes with delicious understatement: “Other 
 writers differ from Sartre on this question” (204). 
 
 24 Alexandria is not just or simply the Other, because its historical position as con¬ 
 duit between East and West renders it at once familiar and foreign to its Western 
 visitors. This fact radically complicates the Orientalist’s goal (and makes a sim¬ 
 plistic application of Said’s formula impossible), for it means that Alexandria can 
 never be totally differentiated and appropriated, since it is also a part of the West- 
 
Mappings of Male Desire 105 
 
 ern consciousness. Hence the impossibility of Darley’s attempt to render the city's 
 exoticism a theatrical spectacle. 
 
 25 Durrell, yustine, 4; Balthazar, 46. 
 
 26 Durrell, Balthazar, 121: Justine, 35. Durrell’s evocation of Justine is similar to 
 Said’s description of Western visions of the Orient as "passive, seminal, feminine, 
 even silent and supine” (Orientalism, 138). 
 
 27 Durrell, Balthazar, 13, 105. Here my terminology evokes Teresa de Lauretis’s de¬ 
 scription of narrative desire as an oedipal and male-gendered activity in Alice 
 Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, 1984), 109, in which woman 
 is doomed to serve as a marker or obstacle, like the Sphinx, in a story of heroic 
 quest that is never her own. 
 
 28 Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, 1985), 
 33 “ 34 . 42. For more on Durrell’s existentialism, see Chet Taylor, "Dissonance and 
 Digression; The Ill-Fitting Fusion of Philosophy and Form in Lawrence DurrelTs 
 Alexandria Quartet," Modern Fiction Studies 17 (Summer 1971): 167-79. 
 
 29 Durrell, Clea, 47-48: emphasis mine. 
 
 30 On this specular logic of the same, see Luce Irigaray, Speculum de I'autre femme 
 (Paris, 1974). Punning on the French homme (man) and Latin homo (same), she 
 labels patriarchy’s economy of desire as hom(m)osexualite; in Durrell, what might 
 be called the ‘’hom(m)oerotic” desires generated by masculine specularization 
 ironically open the floodgates to a “homoerotics” of desire in the usual sense of 
 the term. 
 
 31 Durrell, Clea, 54; Justine, 82, 4. 
 
 32 Durrell,yustine, ii, 21; Clea, 214; Balthazar, 121, 12. 
 
 33 Durrell, Balthazar, 8, 13; Justine, 78. 
 
 34 1 am greatly indebted to David Wingrove, whose superb seminar paper, “Dance of 
 the Black Dominos: Narrative and Sex-Roles in Durrell’s Balthazar," inspired me 
 to return to Durrell in the first place, for making this connection, as well as for 
 his comments on the roles that Scobie, Clea, and Narouz play in bringing Darley’s 
 repressions to the surface of the narration. 
 
 35 Durrell, Balthazar, 15-16. 
 
 36 Ibid., 19, 23, 32-33: Justine, 108. 
 
 37 Much less humorously, Scobie’s perspective captures the unthinking mentality 
 that allowed for the Western appropriation and exploitation of racially other, 
 “inferior” bodies, male or female. As Sedgwick notes in reference to Sir Richard 
 Burton’s implicit linking of pederastic habits with racial inferiority, “the foreign 
 siting, in imperialist literature,” makes “the image of [sodomy] more articulately 
 available” (Between Men, 193). See Wickes, ed.. Private Correspondence, 90, 195, 
 196, where Durrell suggests to Miller that the underlying inspiration of the Quartet 
 as a heterosexist fantasy of girls as meat-to-be-devoured is the fear of sodomy as 
 an ultimate kind of indulgence in passive pleasure (like drugs, food) that spells 
 death to the self: “One could not continue to live here without practising a sort of 
 death—hashish or boys or food.” This overwriting of “boys” by “girls” as objects 
 
106 Joseph A. Boone 
 
 to be consumed parallels, in reverse, Scobie’s overwriting of female sexuality with 
 pederastic pleasures. 
 
 38 Durrell, Balthazar, 41-42, 46. 
 
 39 Ibid., 157. 
 
 40 Ibid., 58-59. See Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Icon¬ 
 ography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Lit¬ 
 erature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 212, 221, 229. In addition to Flaubert’s 
 references (Steegmuller, ed., Flaubert in Egypt, 85, 203), the conflation of “ugly” 
 visage and desirability occurs in Maxime du Camp’s description of the “former 
 bardash” Khalil, one of the crew members, who is “rather ugly, with a shifty look,” 
 but does, “in fact, have a charming behind” (Flaubert in Egypt, 225). 
 
 41 Durrell, Balthazar, 158-59. 
 
 42 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey 
 (New York, 1962), 13-14, 37-38. See Durrell, Justine, 82. 
 
 43 Durrell, Balthazar, 160: emphasis mine. On hindsight one realizes that this scene 
 has been briefly represented in Justine, where Darley describes entering a prosti¬ 
 tute’s lighted booth “to wait my turn” (166)—the same phrase used in Balthazar. 
 
 44 Durrell, Balthazar, 182. 
 
 45 Ibid., 185: emphasis mine. See also 182, 186, 196. 
 
 46 Ibid., 195. 
 
 47 Durrell, Mountolive, 133, 137: Clea, 81. 
 
 48 Durrell, Clea, 244-45. 
 
 49 Alan Warren Friedman, Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet: Art for 
 Love’s Sake (Norman. Ok., 1970), 148. Upon this “necessary sacrifice,” Friedman 
 continues, Darley "sheds his unmanly timidity” (149). 
 
 50 Pinchin, “Fatal Cleopatra,” 235, citing Theodore Reik. 
 
 51 Durrell, Clea, 249, loi. To view Clea as sexually incomplete until her seduction by 
 a man of course elides the sexual experience she has earlier shared with Justine: 
 only from a heterosexual viewpoint is she a “virgin” at the time of Amaril’s se¬ 
 duction. As Pinchin wittily puts it, “Amaril and Darley, male doctor and writer 
 . . . make a good woman of Clea . . . [by] curing her of her homosexuality and her 
 virginity” (“Fatal Cleopatra,” 235). 
 
 52 Durrell, Clea, 173, 170. 
 
 53 ibid., 262. 
 
 54 Ibid., 275. 
 
 55 1 borrow the phrase “writing couples” from Alice Jardine, “Death Sentences: Writ¬ 
 ing Couples and Ideology,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary 
 Perspectives, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). 84-96. 
 
 56 Steegmuller, ed., Flaubert in Egypt, 130. 
 
 57 Ibid., 86-87. 
 
 58 Ibid., 199. 
 
Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser’s 
 Familiar Letters 
 
 Januarye eclogue of Spenser’s Shep- 
 heardes Calender is filled with Colin Clout’s 
 insistent complaint about the unresponsive¬ 
 ness of Rosalind. Not far from the close of 
 this lament, the text exhibits an exorbitancy 
 beyond its compulsive repetitiveness: 
 
 It is not Hobbinol, wherefore 1 plaine, 
 
 Albee my love he seeke with dayly suit: 
 
 His clownish gifts and curtsies 1 disdaine, 
 
 His kiddes, his cracknelles, and his early 
 fruit. 
 
 Ah foolish Hobbinol, thy gyfts bene 
 vayne: 
 
 Colin them gives to Rosalind againe.' 
 
 A gloss for the third of these lines, provided 
 by the marginal figure of E. K., seeks to 
 establish the propriety of the entrance of 
 Hobbinol onto the scene of Colin’s complaint: 
 “His clownish gyfts . . . imitateth Virgils 
 verse, Rusticus es Corydon, nec munera curat 
 Alexis.’’^ E. K. invites the reader to open 
 Virgil’s second eclogue to line fifty-six, in 
 which the shepherd Corydon addresses him- 
 
108 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 self and scores the folly of his suit: his gifts have not won Alexis. 
 “Ah foolish Hobbinol”: the line translates and transfers “rusticus es, 
 Corydon” to Hobbinol, doubling the allusion, provoking exorbitant 
 questions—not only the question of what Hobbinol’s love for Colin 
 Clout is doing in this text, with its monomaniacal lament for Rosa¬ 
 lind, but also this one: if Colin is Alexis to Hobbinol’s Corydon, is 
 Colin thereby cast as Corydon in relationship to Rosalind’s Alexis? 
 How far does the allusion to Virgil’s eclogue go? Where does the lit¬ 
 erary allusion place the erotics of Spenser’s text? 
 
 The questions begin to answer themselves, but only insofar as they 
 point to an excessive economy, literary and erotic at once, of transla¬ 
 tion and transference. “It is not Hobbinol, wherefore I plaine”; Colin 
 is not Corydon complaining about Alexis —his Alexis is Rosalind. 
 The allusion establishes the genre of the Januarye eclogue through 
 its Virgilian antecedent, and Colin’s complaint transfers Corydon’s, 
 rewriting Virgil in a series of reversals. The iciness of January re¬ 
 places the scorching heat of Virgil’s second eclogue. Corydon burns: 
 “Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim.’’’ Colin freezes: “Such 
 rage as winters, reigneth in my heart, / My life bloud friesing with 
 unkindly cold.” Genre revision is also gender revision: Rosalind, the 
 woman from “the neighbour towne” who scorns Colin’s rustic music, 
 takes the part of Alexis, the urbane favorite of his master who cannot 
 be persuaded of the pleasures of the countryside. E. K. gratuitously 
 suggests the translation in a further gloss: “Neighbour towne . . . 
 the next towne: expressing the Latine Vicina,’”' a note that refers to 
 no original Latin “vicina”; it suggests the “vicinity” of the Januarye 
 eclogue nonetheless, for Spenser’s poem translates Virgil’s eclogue 
 back to its model, the eleventh idyll of Theocritus, Polyphemos’s la¬ 
 ment for Galatea. The reversals of genre and gender are true to a 
 doubled source. 
 
 “Ah foolish Hobbinol, thy gyfts bene vayne: / Colin them gives to 
 Rosalind againe.” The analogical structure of this exchange of gifts 
 (Hobbinol is to Colin as Colin is to Rosalind) repeats the generic 
 transformation of the second eclogue, a doubling (giving again) that 
 splits the same, rerouting Corydon’s catalog of gifts for Alexis. The 
 same gifts pass from Hobbinol to Colin and from Colin to Rosalind: 
 the same “vayne” effect is achieved in each case—it passes through 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 109 
 
 several hands and is yet refused. Although it is the same, it is no one’s 
 and never proper, a text circulating from hand to hand, always out of 
 hand, never arriving. Yet this circulation within the same also opens 
 difference, sexual difference most notably. For the circular structure 
 further suggests that if Colin is Alexis to Hobbinol’s Corydon, and 
 Corydon to Rosalind’s Alexis, he plays Rosalind to Hobbinol’s frus¬ 
 trated suit. The homologies of this circulation place Colin at a split 
 center, doubling himself; Janus-faced, he looks two ways. 
 
 Mirror tricks of genre and gender: true, again, to the source. Colin 
 looks at the “barrein ground” and sees “a myrrhour”; Corydon looks 
 at the sea and sees himself, in an ideal projection, as Daphnis, as 
 the image does not deceive (“si numquam fallit imago”). Corydon 
 offers Alexis the chestnuts that pleased Amaryllis when she was his 
 beloved: Colin passes Hobbinol’s gifts on to Rosalind. Duplicating 
 images, the same becomes different. In Virgil’s poem, Corydon has 
 loved Amaryllis and now loves Alexis to his sorrow: he might bet¬ 
 ter, he says, have borne the disdain of Amaryllis, or have accepted 
 Menalcas, unattractive as he is. In Virgil’s Rome, such alternatives 
 were possible—the love of boys and the love of women were not op¬ 
 posing categories.* And in Elizabethan England? “A Shepheards boye 
 (no better do him call)”: so is Colin Clout introduced. Can this boy 
 thus play the woman’s part? Another Rosalind, Shakespeare’s, play¬ 
 ing the part of Ganymede in As You Like It, might reply, affirming 
 the identification: “for every passion something and for no passion 
 truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this 
 color.” 
 
 Such a reading is policed from the margin in E. K.’s gloss on Hob- 
 binol: “In thys place seemeth to be some savour of disorderly love, 
 which the learned call psederastice: but it is gathered beside his mean¬ 
 ing.”* E. K., whose earlier translation of neighborhood had granted 
 proximity to vicinity, rules “disorderly love” out of “thys place” and 
 “beside his meaning.” Beside; extraneous or parallel? The question, 
 once again, is of the economies of exchange, of genre and gender. 
 Eor, even as E. K.’s citation of Virgil suggests, the Januarye eclogue 
 operates through displacement and replacement. Its “place” is trans¬ 
 lation, the mirrored spacing of a proximity; “thys place” is always 
 “beside his meaning.” The exorbitancy of allusion guarantees such 
 
no Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 proximity. And thus E. K.’s gloss registers its refusal of “disorderly 
 love” by ordering it through an act of learned translation; this love 
 properly speaks Greek (paederastice) even as the poem’s “neighbor¬ 
 hood” is translated Latin. What is “gathered beside” is an exorbitancy 
 written within the economies of exchange, the circulation of the gift 
 and text: “for every passion something and for no passion truly any¬ 
 thing,” as Shakespeare’s Rosalind puts it, the exorbitancy—something 
 and nothing at once—of literature. 
 
 Even as E. K. rules out a reading, he rules it into the textual econo¬ 
 mies of the Shepheardes Calender; E. K.’s gloss continues with classi¬ 
 cal citations of a proper pederasty, the example of Socrates, to arrive 
 at this conclusion: “And so is paederastice much to be praeferred be¬ 
 fore gynerastice, that is the love whiche enflameth men with lust 
 toward woman kind.”^ Does this classicism—from Virgil’s second 
 eclogue to a platonized and delibidinized Socrates—secure the lit¬ 
 erary propriety of the text? Consider Erasmus’s account of the sec¬ 
 ond eclogue in De Ratione Studii, where Virgil’s poem is chosen to 
 illustrate pedagogic method. The poem, Erasmus says, will allow the 
 teacher to discourse on friendship: “ The essence of friendship,’ the 
 Master would begin, ‘lies in similarity.’ Pairs of friends like Castor 
 and Pollux are to be adduced, and then the poem may be read: “Now 
 it is as a parable of unstable friendship that the Master should treat 
 this Eclogue. Alexis is of the town, Corydon a countryman: Corydon 
 a shepherd: Alexis a man of society. Alexis cultivated, young, grace¬ 
 ful; Corydon rude, crippled, his youth far behind him. Hence the 
 impossibility of a true friendship.”® Eor Erasmus, Virgil’s poem savors 
 of disorderly love, “unstable friendship,” differences that refuse the 
 homeostasis of “similarity,” identifications within the self-same and 
 proper. Erom an Erasmian perspective, E. K.’s glosses—the poet “imi- 
 tateth Virgils verse,” the learned disquisition on a proper pederasty 
 —would be excessive; rather than placing Spenser’s poem within the 
 confines of classical purity, they overstep those limits. 
 
 Yet the “place” of that textual exorbitance, as we have remarked 
 already, is within similitude, and even the Erasmian text offers a 
 mirror. Among the exemplars of friendship adduced by Erasmus is 
 “the beautiful myth of Narcissus.” “What has more likeness to our¬ 
 selves than our own reflection?” Erasmus goes on to ask. His text, too. 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 111 
 
 succumbs to the mirror effects of the Januarye eclogue, displays the 
 same logic as the marginal (and exorbitant) glosses of E. K. and their 
 double-edged reflections that attempt to “place” the poem within its 
 sexual and textual economies, a place that escapes those confines by 
 passing through the mirror. The excessive logic of the mirror of Nar¬ 
 cissus may overcome the moral economies in which Erasmus would 
 place Virgil’s second eclogue—or those that regulate a reading of the 
 Januarye eclogue: “The Mirror Stage of Colin Clout.” 
 
 Thus Harry Berger, Jr., titles his complaint against the Januarye 
 eclogue for its “self-indulgent” displays of “narcissistic metamorpho¬ 
 sis”: “Perhaps, to speculate idly, this confusion of literary and erotic 
 motives informed the poetry addressed to Rosalind and affected her 
 adverse reactions: perhaps she questioned the poet-lover’s sincerity as 
 well as his taste.”'® Whether she did or not, Berger does. His “specu¬ 
 lations” pass through the mirror as he assumes the place of Rosalind, 
 disdaining Colin Clout’s narcissistic literary love; or when he occu¬ 
 pies the place in which he muses, “why love a lass rather than some¬ 
 one or something more tractable—e.g., Hobbinoll or the ‘refyned 
 forme’ of the woman as Idea—and more susceptible to the allure of 
 Epanorthosis and Paronomasia?” Berger reacts excessively to Colin’s 
 line “1 love thilke lasse, (alas why doe 1 love?) ” and to E. K.’s gloss, “a 
 prety Epanorthosis in these two verses, and withall a Paronomasia or 
 playing with the word.” Mere rhetoric, Berger charges; rhetoric, E. K. 
 defends. Berger “speculates” within the exorbitancy of identifications 
 within the mirror—voicing, variously, vicariously, the positions of 
 Rosalind, of Colin, of E. K., and Hobbinol. “How real—how genuine 
 or authentic—are the love and grief that can be proportioned to the 
 demands of poetry and displayed in the mirror of art?” " One answer 
 suggests itself as the text places Berger’s ethical stance, capturing 
 it within the mirror. What, we may ask again, is the “place” of the 
 Januarye eclogue within the “real”? 
 
 Alan Bray addresses the question, taking up the nineteenth-century 
 misapprehension that the imitation of classical literature in the Re¬ 
 naissance functioned (as it did for the Victorians) as a sign “imply¬ 
 ing a tolerant attitude to homosexuality.”'^ “Apparently homosexual 
 themes in Renaissance literature need to be treated with extreme 
 caution,” Bray argues. Perhaps, he suggests, the extraordinary case 
 
112 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 of Christopher Marlowe (his supposed saying that St. John was “Our 
 Saviour Christ’s Alexis”) does represent Marlowe’s homosexual ap¬ 
 propriation of Virgil’s second eclogue, but more often classical imi¬ 
 tations (as when Richard Barnfield writes to his Ganymede) are 
 “literary exercises” and nothing more—except to those readers who 
 wanted to find in such poems justifications for their sexual tastes.'^ 
 They prove, Bray contends, nothing about their authors. Bray, then, 
 would appear to agree with Berger; there is nothing real in the Janu- 
 arye eclogue, it tells us nothing about Spenser himself, or his loves; 
 it is all rhetorical play, exercises in a literariness at a remove from 
 history. 
 
 What is shaky in Bray’s argument is implicit in the title of the 
 chapter in which he discusses these questions, “Society and the In¬ 
 dividual,” for those terms have already assumed an opposition that 
 is, arguably, a post-Renaissance, post-Cartesian development, and 
 whose use by Bray has the unfortunate effect of making an ideologi¬ 
 cal argument by assuming as universal a quite particular historical 
 (and liberal, bourgeois) construction of the “individual” subject.'’' 
 This is something that Bray knows quite well since it helps him to 
 explain the emergence of homosexual “individuals” in the early eigh¬ 
 teenth century, and he cautions that the terms are not to be found 
 in the Renaissance: “To talk of an individual in this period as being 
 or not being ‘a homosexual’ is an anachronism and ruinously mis¬ 
 leading”—misleading, as I have argued elsewhere, even in the case of 
 Christopher Marlowe.'^ 
 
 When Bray decides that Barnfield’s commonplace book, “never in¬ 
 tended for publication and . . . both robustly pornographic and en¬ 
 tirely heterosexual,” offers the real truth about its author’s sexual 
 orientation, savoring of the “personal experience” lacking in his lit¬ 
 erary exercises addressed to Ganymede and other Arcadian shep¬ 
 herds, he anachronistically assumes the opposition of homosexual 
 and heterosexual, and he assumes that Barnfield must have been one 
 or the other. The characterization of those entries as “robustly porno¬ 
 graphic” (as opposed to the “delicate sensibility” of the poems) as 
 well as the categories of “entirely heterosexual” and “personal ex¬ 
 perience” needs to be scrutinized for what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 might call their “inadvertent reification.”'* For Bray, the secret status 
 
Spenser's Familiar Letters 113 
 
 of the commonplace book assures the truth of Barnfield’s heterosexu¬ 
 ality; but this, too, is anachronistic. It assumes a modern “deploy¬ 
 ment of sexuality” (in Foucault’s term)to be in place, in which one 
 can be sure that the deepest secret of the self is its sexuality, espe¬ 
 cially if, as in the case of Barnfield, it assumes the excessive form that 
 Bray calls pornographic. Yet to read the evidence about Barnfield this 
 way rewrites him as a modern subject. It dismisses what might be 
 called the “open secret” of Barnfield’s published poems without ask¬ 
 ing how they assumed a “place” in the Elizabethan world.'* For the 
 answer to that question cannot be the one that Bray assumes: that its 
 classical literariness necessarily assured that it would go unremarked 
 (Erasmus suggests otherwise): nor that it could be read homosexu- 
 ally by those inclined in that direction. For, as Bray himself argues, 
 one could not identify oneself as being so inclined. Or, to put the 
 point— Bray’s point —more radically, there were no homosexuals in 
 Renaissance England. 
 
 Such, too, was the case in Virgil’s Rome; if homosexuality is a term 
 that signifies only in relationship to the binary opposition homo¬ 
 sexual/heterosexual, then the second eclogue does not operate within 
 that system. Within the Roman sexual system, as Veyne has argued 
 (following Foucault), what mattered was not the gender of the love 
 object but his/her class and age; sexuality was congruent with power 
 differences. So long as a man was the penetrator, he was a man; slave 
 boys and women were the appropriate objects of his desire. Virgil’s 
 poem is not necessarily circumscribed by this system—Alexis is not 
 a slave, but his master’s favorite: Corydon, who may well be older, 
 also appears to be of a lower class than Alexis, and his love seems 
 to exceed the Roman norm of a passionless sexuality. Virgil’s poem, 
 translating the grotesquerie of Polyphemos’s love for Galatea, opens 
 itself toward the Erasmian dismissal of its disorderliness even as it 
 uses that safeguard to extend the limits of acceptability, an extension 
 that may also return his poem to the orbit of the erotic system of 
 ancient Greece, which, although similar to the Roman system, had 
 not viewed slave boys as the preferred sexual objects. Rather, as Fou¬ 
 cault has claimed, the entire ethical system of Greek pederasty was 
 directed at questions having to do with free-born boys.” 
 
 Bray argues that differentials of class and age in a number of in- 
 
114 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 stitutional sites—the family, the school, the apprentice system—also 
 operate to define sexual spheres in Renaissance England in which 
 homosexual acts could and did take place. Such acts do not prove 
 their actors homosexual; likewise, texts like the Januarye eclogue 
 (or Barnfield’s classical pastorals) will never tell us whether their 
 authors slept with boys. But they may, in the very exorbitancy that 
 1 have been reading, tell us about the “place” of homosexuality in 
 Renaissance England: not least if, as Bray contends, it had no place, 
 was not a site of recognition of sexual identity. Bray posits a discon¬ 
 nection between the stigmatization of homosexual acts (within the 
 larger category of sodomy) and their enactment in places in which 
 they went unseen and seen. This is, in effect, to describe the place of 
 homosexuality as an open secret. If sodomy is the term most proxi¬ 
 mate to homosexuality in the period, it functions neither solely to 
 designate sex between men, nor is it only (perhaps not even pri¬ 
 marily) a sexual term. Designating a range of interlinked social and 
 religious transgressions, it also leaves untouched, Bray argues, the or¬ 
 dinary social channels that permitted homosexual acts to be dissemi¬ 
 nated through all the differentials of power that mark the hierarchies 
 of Renaissance society. “The individual could simply avoid making 
 the connection; he could keep at two opposite poles the social pres¬ 
 sures bearing down on him and his own discordant sexual behavior, 
 and avoid recognising it for what it was.”^° But what was it? Bray’s 
 sentences, brilliant in suggesting the dehiscence that opens the place 
 of homosexuality, has already foreclosed it by assuming an identity 
 for that “it” which, as his argument suggests, cannot succumb to the 
 later scheme in which “homosexuality” is a recognized and recogniz¬ 
 able category. 
 
 The reading of Januarye that I have been offering may appear to 
 have been an exercise in deconstructive undecidability, merely rhe¬ 
 torical play. I would contend, however, that it offers a way to read 
 the (no) place of homosexuality in Renaissance culture—that the 
 mirror effects of Januarye secure a place for homosexuality through 
 such tactics of resemblance. How to move from the text, and these 
 textual effects, into the world are in fact suggested by the Shep- 
 heardes Calender, not least by E. K.’s tactics of reading. For his gloss, 
 on the margins, also opens up a relationship between the text and the 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 115 
 
 world, opens it and covers it over as does his gloss on “ptederastice.” 
 That double play has the structure of the open secret. Who is Colin 
 Clout? “Under which name this Poete secretly shadoweth himself.” 
 Hobbinol?: “a fained country name, whereby, it being so commune 
 and usuall, seemeth to be hidden the person of some his very spe- 
 ciall and most familiar freend, whom he entirely and extraordinarily 
 beloved, as peradventure shall be more largely declared hereafter.” 
 “Rosalinde ... is also a feigned name, which being wel ordered, wil 
 bewray the very name of hys love and mistresse, whom by that name 
 he coloureth.”^' E. K.’s directions for reading cannot be taken very 
 straightforwardly (nor, for that matter, can “E. K.,” whose initials re¬ 
 main to be deciphered). If Spenser “is” Colin Clout, for example, he is 
 also figured as Immerito in the Shepheardes Calender and no “proper” 
 name is ever delivered for the doubly named author of a yet anony¬ 
 mous text.” E. K.’s directions for reading Rosalind treat her name as 
 an anagram—as if the name were itself disordered (or the name of 
 disorderly love), and as if to find her would be the same as performing 
 a play on the letter. In this teasing play between revelation and re¬ 
 veiling, the Calender dangles its secrets—the secret of an authorship 
 maintained through a disappearing act in disseminative naming: of 
 an Eros that may never pass beyond the letter, and which yet opens 
 a way (within a certain psychoanalytic framework, the way).” The 
 open secret of this text is not homosexuality, as might well be the 
 case if this were a Victorian imitation of a classical poem. Instead, it 
 has no name, “being so commune and usuall” and, at the same time, 
 “very speciall and most familiar.” Or, if it does have one, it could be 
 called (following Sedgwick) homosociality. In this text, the name of 
 the open secret is Hobbinol. 
 
 Spenser’s name remains veiled in the Calender. E. K. and Rosalind 
 have never been deciphered. But E. K.’s promise to declare hereafter 
 the identity of Hobbinol is delivered in a gloss to September. “Colin 
 cloute . . . Nowe 1 thinke no man doubteth but by Colin is ever 
 meante the Authour selfe. Whose especiall good freend Hobbinoll 
 sayth he is, or more rightly Mayster Gabriel Harvey: of whose spe¬ 
 ciall commendation, aswell in Poetrye as Rhetorike and other choyce 
 learning, we have lately had a sufficient tryall in diverse his workes.” 
 That revelation is prepared for from the start. E. K.’s dedicatory epis- 
 
116 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 tie to the Calender is addressed to Harvey, introducing the new poet 
 to someone who scarcely needs such an introduction, “his verie spe¬ 
 cial and singular good frend,” and that description is immediately 
 applied to Hobbinol, as we have seen, in the gloss to Januarye: “his 
 very speciall and most familiar freend.”^'’ Hobbinol, moreover, is a 
 name that Harvey takes for himself at the close of the third of the 
 Three Proper, and wittie, familiar Letters that he exchanged with 
 “Immerito” in a volume that appeared in 1580 , a year after the pub¬ 
 lication of the Calender, another anonymous production in which 
 Harvey’s name is the open secret as soon as one gets past the title page 
 and to the first letter addressed by Immerito to his “long approoved 
 and singular good friende. Master G. H.” And, if there were any doubt 
 about who “Maister G. H. Fellow of Trinitie Hall in Cambridge” is, 
 as he is addressed in the first of the Two Other very commendable Let¬ 
 ters that accompanied the first three, a poem of Immerito’s enclosed 
 in that letter twice names “Harvey” explicitly, puns on his angelic 
 first name, Gabriel, and ends by bidding farewell to “Mi amabilis- 
 sime / Harveie, meo cordi, meorum omnium longe charissime”: “My 
 sweetest Harvey, to me of all my friends by far the dearest.” 
 
 Within the Shepheardes Calender, Hobbinol is the shepherd suffer¬ 
 ing from unrequited love for Colin, and that fiction is maintained from 
 Januarye to Aprill, where, in response to Thenot’s question about 
 the causes of his sorrow—lambs stolen by wolves? bagpipe broken? 
 abandoned by a “lasse”? weeping like the showers of April?—Hobbinol 
 replies “Nor thys, nor that, so muche doeth make me mourne, / 
 But for the ladde, whome long I lovd so deare”; to June, where Colin 
 tells Hobbinol that his paradise is not for him; to September, and 
 the line that E. K. glosses: “Colin he whilome my ioye.” But in the 
 gloss, and in the surrounding apparatus that extends from the poem 
 to other texts and into the world, Hobbinol is Gabriel Harvey, and 
 the poet’s special friendship for him is repeatedly announced. Indeed, 
 in the farewell poem to Harvey (written when Immerito plans to 
 leave England on a voyage to the continent), Immerito’s veil is almost 
 dropped as well when he ventriloquizes Harvey’s lament for his ab¬ 
 sent friend: “Would Heaven my Edmund were here. / He would have 
 written me news, nor himself have been silent / Regarding his love, 
 and often, in his heart and with words / Of the kindest, would bless 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 117 
 
 me.”“ The relationship between Hobbinol, in the eclogues of the Cal¬ 
 ender, and Harvey, in the margins, functions like the reverse mirror 
 of Januarye, identifying (Hobbinol is Harvey), doubling (Harvey is 
 Hobbinol), and reversing (the rejected lover is the special friend) all 
 at the same time. This mirror extends into the world, Harvey taking 
 Hobbinol for his own name in a letter to Immerito. What the eclogues 
 structure as denial and refusal, the surrounding context figures as the 
 acceptance of a special friendship. How is this (non) relationship to 
 be read? 
 
 One answer lies within the eclogues themselves, and Hobbinol’s 
 role within the pastoral fiction; there he secures a literariness asso¬ 
 ciated with that transformative place, and Colin’s refusal of his ad¬ 
 vances also signals his frustrated attempts to pass beyond pastoral. 
 From the start, Colin has broken the pipes of Pan, moved toward the 
 urban Rosalind, to his devastation; and as late as Colin Clouts Come 
 Home Again (1595), his return to pastoral is a return to Hobbinol, as 
 “The shepheards boy (best knowen by that name) ’’ re-encounters the 
 one who “lov’d this shepheard dearest in degree.” As late as that poem 
 or the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, Rosalind still names what 
 cannot be had. And those returns to pastoral and to Hobbinol remain 
 returns to a refusal of Hobbinol. Colin continues to look elsewhere. 
 This is how Hobbinol explains his plight to Thenot in Aprill: “the 
 ladde, whome long 1 lovd so deare / Now loves a lasse,” and that love 
 has made the writing of pastoral poetry impossible. “Lo Colin, here 
 the place”: so Hobbinol in June speaks to Colin, luring him to a “Para¬ 
 dise” that Colin rejects as no longer possible. Hobbinol, throughout 
 the Calender, is associated with “the place”—the literary, erotic, and 
 sociohistorical place—from which Colin affirms his displacement. 
 
 This refusal reads doubly, however; within a duplicity that can be 
 found in the Calender, one can begin to move toward the world which 
 it mirrors in reverse. For however much Colin denies, he is a figure in 
 a pastoral poem; the place from which Colin affirms his displacement 
 is the place in which he affirms it. The poet embraces what his figure 
 refuses. The denials are productive. They produce the poems as that 
 double place from which aspirations—toward Rosalind, toward kinds 
 of poetry other than pastoral—can be launched and denied at the 
 same time. Rosalind refuses Colin; in June, he reports that she has 
 
118 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 instead taken Menalcas, the dark young man whom Virgil’s Corydon 
 scorned. Even as the poems glance beyond the confines of pastoral, 
 they are returned within its limits, still turning on Virgilian tropes. 
 But it is also within the confines of Virgilian pastoral that it be exor¬ 
 bitant, that it establish relationships with the world; it establishes 
 them by denying them, and Hobbinol is within the eclogues the figure 
 for that denial. 
 
 It has become commonplace in certain critical practices that are 
 called “new historicist” to argue that “love is not love” or that pas¬ 
 toral otium is really negotium.^^ This essay shares with such work the 
 desire to read texts into the world. But in describing the trick mir¬ 
 ror that the Shepheardes Calender holds up to the world, in pursuing 
 the reversed identification of Hobbinol and Harvey, it seems to me 
 important not to allegorize and thematize the text so entirely that 
 its sole function is to read the world at the expense of the text, to 
 decide beforehand that the world is real and that the only reality that 
 a text might have would be its ability to translate the world in terms 
 that need to be translated back into the social, historical, or political. 
 The literary and erotic translations performed in the Calender extend 
 into the world, as the Hobbinol-Harvey identification would seem to 
 guarantee. But it cannot be read as a simple act of translation. The 
 name “Hobbinol” is carried beyond the confines of the Shepheardes 
 Calender, even as the name “Harvey” appears on its borders. And the 
 double structure within pastoral also extends into the “real” world. 
 We can see it as congruent with the dehiscence that Bray describes, 
 articulating the site of a (non)relationship and a (non)recognition. 
 We can see it, too, in the fact of double nomination, Harvey/Hob- 
 binol, Immerito/Colin, and the space of (non)identification that it 
 opens. These are structures of identification in a mirror, a productive 
 site of replication. 
 
 If we look at the moment in September when the veil is dropped, 
 and Harvey’s name delivered, we find it in a gloss on HobbinoTs 
 request that Diggon tell the tale of Roffynn; Hobbinol would hear the 
 story since “Colin clout I wene be his selfe boye”—i.e., Colin is Rof¬ 
 fynn’s boy and not, as Hobbinol goes on to say, as he once was, his 
 own: “(Ah for Colin he whilome my ioye).” September is a particu¬ 
 larly dark eclogue, glancing in Roffynn’s tale and elsewhere at matters 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 119 
 
 of state and church, but this particular identification is not all that 
 hard to decipher. We can find “Roffynn” on the flyleaf to Harvey’s 
 copy of Jerome Turler’s The Traveller, as he records it as a gift from 
 Spenser: “ex dono Edmundi Spenserii, Episcopi Roffensis Secretarii. 
 1578.’’^® Roffynn anglicizes the Latin name of John Young, Bishop of 
 Rochester, whose secretary Spenser became in the spring of 1578. If, 
 elsewhere in the Calender, and throughout Spenser’s poems, Hobbi- 
 nol appears as the rival for Rosalind, here he is in a similar position 
 with Roffynn; as Colin moves beyond the pastoral world, Hobbinol 
 stays behind, representing what must be refused in order to advance. 
 But advancement also occurs through what is represented by Hobbi¬ 
 nol: a mode of high literariness that gives one credentials within the 
 world—in this instance, the classicizing pastoral of the Calender — 
 within the exorbitancy of humanistic pedagogy. The secrets of the 
 Calender are the open secrets of a secretariat, and of aspirations that 
 must veil themselves in this humble form. 
 
 Harvey’s role in this worldliness is insisted upon as E. K. con¬ 
 tinues his gloss, identifying Harvey in the September eclogue: he lists 
 his recent publications “aswell in Poetrye as Rhetorike’’ and details 
 Harvey’s presentation of a copy of “his late Gratulationum Valdinen- 
 sium” to Queen Elizabeth “at the worshipfull Maister Capells in 
 Hertfordshire.’’^’ Harvey’s attempts to use his rhetorico-literary skills 
 to secure him a place in the world are perhaps the most spectacular 
 examples of the failure of the promises of humanistic pedagogy in 
 the Elizabethan period. Uncannily, Spenser uses Hobbinol/Harvey as 
 the name that secures failure by denying the very tools by which suc¬ 
 cess can be achieved. Yet Harvey, probably not more than a couple 
 of years Spenser’s senior but, more importantly, already a Eellow at 
 Pembroke when Spenser entered as sizar, a poor boy, in 1569, also 
 functions as mentor and guide. The intimacy with his special friend 
 writes the aspirations within the rhetorico-literary even as the name 
 Hobbinol insists that such aspirers know their place: boys, secretaries 
 to the great and powerful. 
 
 The trick mirrors of Januarye negotiate the place of the literary 
 within the sociopolitics and the homoerotics of a textual economy 
 that extends into the world and writes the world as much as the 
 world writes the text. The veils of the Calender can be drawn only 
 
120 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 when they open upon an acceptable version of aspiration within 
 the homosocial sphere, aspiration, that is, that knows its place—“A 
 Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call).” Immerito, the worthless 
 one, attaches himself to his special friend Gabriel Harvey, hailing 
 him as in his farewell poem as “a poet transcendent” (“egregium . . . 
 Poetam”) addressed by “the lowliest poet” (“malus . . . Poeta”). The 
 point of homeostasis in this differentiated and hierarchized relation¬ 
 ship with angel Gabriel is their friendship; to this friend, the first 
 line of the farewell poem insists, he is not unfriendly (“non inimicus 
 Amicum”): no disorderly love, it secures the status quo. Within this 
 mirror relation, Harvey/Hobbinol functions as an alter ego, so much 
 so that E. K. can close his dedicatory epistle by urging Harvey to imi¬ 
 tate the new poet and publish: “Now 1 trust M. Harvey, that upon 
 sight of your speciall frends and fellow Poets doings, or els for envie 
 of so many unworthy Quidams, which catch at the garlond, which to 
 you alone is dewe, you will be perswaded to pluck out of the hateful 
 darknesse, those so many excellent English poemes of yours, which 
 lye hid, and bring them forth to eternall light.”’® And the letters ex¬ 
 changed between Immerito and G. H. continue this theme, referring 
 again and again to their secret poems, and urging each other to make 
 them public. This is a structure of emulation recommended by Eras¬ 
 mus and his followers as necessary to pedagogic success; the title page 
 of the Three Vroper, and wittie, familiar Letters proclaims the writers 
 as “two Universitie men." 
 
 Yet in the poem of farewell to Harvey, Edmund urges him to ven¬ 
 ture even further, beyond such pedagogic, humanistic, pastoral econ¬ 
 omies, toward the love that Harvey despises, what G. H. designates 
 in the last of the letters as Immerito’s “womanly humor”: “A mag¬ 
 nanimous spirit, 1 know, spurs you up to the summits / Of honor and 
 inspires your poems with emotions more solemn / Than lighthearted 
 love.”’* For the point seems to be that Harvey’s misogyny (displayed 
 at length in the three letters, as when he paraphrases “Arte Amandi” 
 as “Arte Meretricandi,” or offers two accounts of earthquakes, one 
 for women, another for men) is not requisite for their attachment, 
 nor does the poet’s desire for Rosalind mean the end of their extraor¬ 
 dinary friendship. So, Immerito’s final letter closes, urging Harvey to 
 believe in “the eternall Memorie of our everlasting friendship, the 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 121 
 
 inviolable Memorie of our unspotted friendshippe, the sacred Memo- 
 rie of our vowed friendship. . . . Farewell most hartily, mine owne 
 good Master H. and love me, as 1 love you, and thinke upon poore 
 Immerito, as he thinketh uppon you.”” This mirroring reciprocity 
 defines a proper “unspotted” relationship between men, not the path 
 of Harvey’s aspirations (figured in the Calender as Hobbinol’s root¬ 
 edness), and one secured through the negations written as Rosalind’s 
 refusals and transferred from Colin to Hobbinol, from Immerito to 
 G. H. Letters of farewell, again and again. Harvey/Hobbinol confined 
 to the margins—where the “real” enters the poem—and Harvey, in 
 life, never making his way, confined to his marginalia. 
 
 The love of women does not interrupt this love. Thus the Shep- 
 heardes Calender closes by dispatching Hobbinol as go-between to 
 Rosalind: “Adieu good Hobbinol, that was so true, / Tell Rosalind, 
 her Colin bids her adieu.” These poems of farewell to Harvey/Hobbi¬ 
 nol also write him into Colin/lmmerito/Spenser’s position, structures 
 of denial that ramify out into the world. Here, as they establish a 
 relationship of nonrelationship between men, they do so as Hobbi¬ 
 nol is asked in December to voice the farewell to Rosalind that he 
 has so often received from Colin. In these (un) productive circles, 
 the woman is drawn into the circuit of letters passing between men 
 (Rosalind’s name is never realized beyond such anagrammatization); 
 the woman is infolded as that furthering negation that opens a move¬ 
 ment toward the real. 
 
 So, too, in response to Immerito’s question in the first of the Three 
 Proper, and wittie, familiar Letters, asking why G. H. had not re¬ 
 sponded to his beloved’s letters, G. H. responds—as Hobbinol—prom¬ 
 ising to reply in letters that are worthy of her: “By your own Venus, 
 she is another dear little Rosalind; and not another but the same Hob¬ 
 binol (with your kind permission as before) loves her deeply. O my 
 Mistress Immerito, my most beautiful Collina Clout, countless greet¬ 
 ings to you and farewell.”” The same Hobbinol/Harvey (one and two 
 at once) writes to Mrs. Immerito (the beloved Immerito has mar¬ 
 ried), who is not Rosalind, within the folds of this letter to Immerito. 
 But it is also within the letter that Immerito tells G. H. to remember 
 their special friendship and love—“Continue with usuall writings,” 
 although he wishes for “a Reciprocal! farewell from your owne sweete 
 
122 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 mouth.” And G. H. hopes to comply, wishing that “I may personally 
 performeyour request, and bestowe the sweetest Farewell, upon your 
 sweetmouthed Mastershippe.”^'' 
 
 These proper familiar letters exchanged between friends openly de¬ 
 clare their secrets of translation and transference from the start, 
 beginning with a literal scene of translation in the very first letter 
 from Immerito to G. H. Immerito offers samples of his skills in trans¬ 
 lation, his efforts (under the tutelage of G. H.) to classicize his En¬ 
 glish verses and make their meters Latin: “Seeme they comparable to 
 those two,” he asks, “which 1 translated you ex tempore in bed, the 
 last time we lay togither in Westminster?”” 
 
 Spenser slept with Harvey, and it is no secret. Indeed this is the 
 open secret of a proper and familiar scene, exhibiting the very struc¬ 
 ture E. K. read in the name of Hobbinol in Januarye, “so commune 
 and usuall,” “very speciall and most familiar,” for men habitually 
 shared beds in the Elizabethan age. A secret written elsewhere too, 
 for there is nothing to hide. So Roger Ascham, pausing to memori¬ 
 alize his student John Whitney, now dead, and to bid him farewell, 
 recalls, in his book on double translation, the scene of instruction: 
 “John Whitney, a young gentlemen, was my bedfellow, who, will¬ 
 ing by good nature and provoked by mine advice, began to learn the 
 Latin tongue.”” The text chosen for this double translation “out of 
 Latin into English and out of English into Latin again” was “Tully De 
 amicitia." A proper choice. The scene fulfills the dictates of Erasmian 
 pedagogy to the letter, as the teacher incites the pupil to learn—by 
 loving imitation within the specular relationship of similarity and 
 simulation. The child “must be beguiled and not driven to learning,” 
 Erasmus writes in De Pueris Instituendis, and he continues: “For a 
 boy is often drawn to a subject first for his master’s sake, and after¬ 
 wards for its own. Learning, like many other things, wins our liking 
 for the reason that it is offered to us by one we love.”^^ 
 
 To that bedroom scene Harvey brings another. Judging some other 
 efforts at translation, he recommends the use of models for imita¬ 
 tion: “some Gentlewooman, I coulde name in England . . . might as 
 well have brought forth all goodly faire children” [as a poet might 
 produce excellent poems] “had they at the tyme of their Conception, 
 had in sight, the amiable and gallant beautifull Pictures of Adonis, 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 123 
 
 Cupido, Ganymedes, or the like, which no doubt would have wrought 
 such deepe impression in their fantasies, and imaginations, as their 
 children, and perhappes their Childrens children too, myght have 
 thanked them.”’* “Nature has made the first years of our life prone to 
 imitation,” Erasmus writes; pedagogy is founded in simulation.” But 
 for Harvey, all conception is specular, for men and women alike are 
 produced in the mirror, after the images of desire—Adonis, Cupid, 
 Ganymede. 
 
 This is not only Harvey’s fantasy: it is one shared by his culture. 
 Consider the lines that open Shakespeare’s first and third sonnets in 
 the 1609 edition: “From fairest creatures we desire increase / That 
 thereby beauties Rose might never die”; “Looke in thy glasse and 
 tell the face thou vewest, / Now is the time that face should forme 
 an other.” This is, indeed, the mirror stage, and not only of Colin 
 Clout. For, as Lacan writes in his essay on the role of the mirror 
 stage in the formation of the “I,” that initiation into an alienated 
 and split subjectivity has a biological support instanced, for example, 
 by the necessity for the maturation of the gonad of the pigeon that 
 it see another member of its species—of either sex—or even that it 
 see itself in a mirror: “Facts which inscribe themselves into an order 
 of homeomorphic identification which would fold within itself the 
 question of the notion of beauty as formative and as erogenic.”’® 
 
 The homeomorphic structures identified in this essay ramify within 
 an order that Lacan calls “orthopedic,” the (non)support of an ideal 
 projection—for which Lacan finds the “ancient term imago” apt, 
 and Spenser, the Virgilian imago —in which subjectivity is founded. 
 The Lacanian insistence on the prematurity of human arrival, and 
 its destiny within an imaginary scene, has its Erasmian correspon¬ 
 dent: “Man, lacking instinct, can do little or nothing of innate power; 
 scarce can he eat, or walk, or speak, unless he be guided thereto”; 
 “a man ignorant of Letters is no man at all.”” Imitation of the let¬ 
 ter founds the human within a pedagogic apparatus, the “virage du 
 je speculaire en je social,” turning the specular 1 into the social 1.” 
 Such destiny, as Derrida argues, is a destinerrance, a straying within 
 a letter whose arrival is never guaranteed.” Within that spacing, 
 which, for Elizabethans like Spenser and Harvey, takes the histori¬ 
 cally specific situation of the apparatuses of a homosocial pedagogy. 
 
124 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 the Spenserian career—in life, in letters—is launched. In it, Hobbi- 
 nol/Harvey serves—in life, in letters—as a marginal site, the “place” 
 of the exorbitant meconnaissance that guarantees that institution. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 All citations are from The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and 
 E. De Selincourt (London, 1912). Here and elsewhere, inconsistencies in spelling 
 in my text mirror those in the texts cited. 
 
 2 Ibid., 422. 
 
 3 “A shepherd, Corydon, burned with love for handsome Alexis.” Citations of Virgil 
 are from The Eclogues and Georgies of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (Garden City, 
 N.Y., 1964). 
 
 4 Spenser, Poetical Works, 422. 
 
 5 See Paul Veyne, “Homosexuality in Ancient Rome,” in Western Sexuality, ed. 
 Philippe Aries and Andre Bejin (Oxford, 1985), 26. For a brilliant historical sur¬ 
 vey, see David M. Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” Diacritics 16 
 (1986); 34 - 45 - 
 
 6 Spenser, Poetical Works, 422-23. 
 
 7 Ibid., 423. 
 
 8 William Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method 
 of Education (New York, 1964), 174. 
 
 9 Ibid., 175. 
 
 10 Harry Berger, Jr., “The Mirror Stage of Colin Clout: A New Reading of Spenser’s 
 yanuarye Eclogue,” He/ios 10 (1983): 151, 154. 
 
 11 Ibid., 156, 158. 
 
 12 Alan Bray, Elomosexuahty in Renaissance England (London, 1982), 59. Nothing in 
 my critique of Bray is meant to devalue his book; the problem of literary evidence 
 troubles many distinguished historians, and Bray remains the best guide to the 
 question of homosexuality in Renaissance England. 
 
 13 Ibid., 65, 61. 
 
 14 My critique here follows Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature 
 and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), 83-90. 
 
 15 Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 16: Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy and 
 Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe,” Southwest Review 69 (1985): 371-78. 
 
 16 Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 61: see Sedgwick, Between Men, 86. 
 
 17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 
 pt. 4. 
 
 18 For the role of “open secrets” to secure the secret subjectivity of the modern 
 subject, see D. A. Miller, “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” in The Novel and the 
 Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 192-220. 
 
 19 See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1986), 
 
Spenser’s Familiar Letters 125 
 
 iSyff. In Virgil’s second eclogue, much depends on the final lines of the poem, 
 whether Corydon continues to address himself or is being addressed—something 
 that remains undecidable and thus keeps open the question of the perspective 
 taken on his “dementia.” 
 
 20 Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 67. 
 
 21 Spenser, Poetical Works, 422-23. 
 
 22 For further discussion of these issues, see my “Consuming Texts: Spenser and the 
 Poet’s Economy,” in Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance 
 Texts (New York and London, 1986). 
 
 23 I have in mind the Lacanian framework, in which the refusal ever to embody 
 Rosalind as a “real” woman would testily to the structure of desire shaped by an 
 Other that is, by definition, inaccessible. This leads, within the Lacanian schema, 
 to the postulate that there is no woman per se; and this leads, within an argument 
 like Sedgwick’s, to a realization of the homosocial structure between men that 
 covers over the place of woman. Thus Berger’s ethical complaint—that Colin is 
 in love with a projected idea of woman—can be supported by the recognition of 
 psychic and social structures that make the place of woman insupportable. Yet 
 this structure obtains not only in the case of Rosalind, but also underwrites the 
 place of Colin Clout—and that place writes itself into the real, although never in 
 the same way for each gender. 
 
 24 Spenser, Poetical Works, 455, 415, 422. 
 
 25 Spenser, Poetical Works, 632, 611,635, 638; translation of the Latin poem is included 
 in Spenser's Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore, 1949), 258. 
 
 26 Spenser, Prose Works, 258: for the Latin text see Spenser, Poetical Works, 638. 
 
 27 The first phrase is Sidney’s and is invoked by Arthur Marotti, “ ‘Love is not love’; 
 Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH 49 (1982): 396-428, and 
 is the guiding thesis as well in Marotti’s John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison, 1986). 
 The translation of pastoral otium into negotium is the theme in a number of essays 
 by Louis Montrose; see, for example, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics 
 of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50 (1983): 415-59. My argument attempts to 
 modify the point made repeatedly in such work, that love must be translated into 
 something “real”—ambition—or that pastoral functions as a cover for a place in 
 the world and negotiates the desire for it. 
 
 28 Cited in Virginia Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Ox¬ 
 ford, 1979), 237; for information on Spenser’s secretaryship to Young, see 48-49. 
 Harvey’s parasitic relationship to texts, living in his marginalia, 1 take to describe a 
 modus vivendi, an argument 1 make in part thanks to work in progress by Jennifer 
 Summit. 
 
 29 Spenser, Poetical Works, 455. 
 
 30 Ibid., 419. 
 
 31 Spenser, Poetical Works, 641: Spenser, Prose Works, 256. For the Latin text, see 
 Spenser, Poetical Works, 637. 
 
 32 Spenser, Poetical Works, 641, 638. 
 
126 Jonathan Goldberg 
 
 33 For the Latin text, see Spenser, Poetical Works, 632. My translation depends on 
 the one offered in Frederic Ives Carpenter, A Reference Guide to Edmund Spenser 
 (Chicago, 1923), 58. 
 
 34 Spenser, Poetical Works, 638, 636, 641. 
 
 35 Ibid., 611. 
 
 36 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, 1967), 80. The 
 secret of the shared bed is more usually declared in patronage and servant-master 
 relations where, as Bray argues in “Dreams, Fantasies, and Fears: Defining Sexu¬ 
 ality in Elizabethan England” (a paper distributed at the International Scien¬ 
 tific Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies, Free University, Amsterdam, 15-18 
 December 1987), shared beds (or tables) suggest intimate power and influence. 
 Thus Archbishop Laud recorded in his diary on 21 August 1625 a dream of sleeping 
 with Buckingham. When these relations were politically suspect, such intimacies 
 could fall under the shadow of sodomy. In another paper, “Pederasty in Elizabe¬ 
 than London,” from the same conference, Robert M. Wren starts with the Januarye 
 eclogue and extends Bray’s argument to the theaters and schools—pointing as 
 well to shared beds in such plays as Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, Chapman’s Sir 
 Giles Goosecap, and Shakespeare’s Henry V and Othello, suggesting too that medi¬ 
 cal manuals may have encouraged masturbation in a widespread and culturally 
 countenanced pederasty. 
 
 37 Woodward, Erasmus Concerning . . . Education, 203. 
 
 38 Spenser, Poetical Works, 626. 
 
 39 Woodward, Erasmus Concerning . . . Education, 189. 
 
 40 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits I (Paris, 1966), 92: “Faits qui s’inscrivent dans un ordre 
 d’identification homeomorphique qu’envelopperait la question du sens de la beaute 
 comme formative et comme erogene.” In Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan 
 (New York, 1977), the passage reads: “Such facts are inscribed in an order of 
 homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of 
 the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic” (3). 
 
 41 Woodward, Erasmus Concerning . . . Education, 184, 181. 
 
 42 See Lacan, Ecrits I, 94, 90, 95. 
 
 43 See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan 
 Bass (Chicago, 1987). 
 
Joseph A. Porter 
 
 Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the 
 Canonization of Heterosexuality 
 
 Relations between Marlowe and Shake¬ 
 speare, particularly as manifested in the 
 character of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, 
 serve as an index of the Western canoniza¬ 
 tion of heterosexuality at the expense of 
 homosexuality through the past four cen¬ 
 turies. That exceedingly complex history, 
 only recently starting to be told, continues 
 to unfold in the present, with the on¬ 
 going denial, containment, and suppression 
 of homosexuality countered by powerful re¬ 
 cent movements toward undoing the ortho¬ 
 dox hierarchy that privileges heterosexuality. 
 Our evolving views of relations between the 
 two playwrights, and our processing of the 
 figure of Mercutio, continue to show where 
 we stand in the battle of the sexualities, 
 whether for maintenance of orthodoxy, or for 
 its affirmative-action inversion in a privileg¬ 
 ing of homosexuality, or (as here) for peace¬ 
 ful coexistence and the elimination of hier¬ 
 archy as a stage toward our freeing ourselves 
 from the very categories of homosexuality 
 and heterosexuality.' 
 
128 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 Bearing in mind that “sexuality,” like “homosexuality” and “hetero¬ 
 sexuality,” dates only from the early nineteenth century, and that 
 these terms are variously problematic, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 
 Jonathan Goldberg, Alan Bray, and others are currently helping us 
 see, Marlowe’s sexual stance might be described as intermittently mi- 
 sogynistic, aggressively sensual, and flagrantly homoerotic. 1 list the 
 three characteristics in increasing degree of provocativeness or sub¬ 
 versiveness. The misogyny shows in moments like Tamburlaine’s off- 
 the-cuff totalizing remark that “women must be flattered,” and also 
 in a stinginess notable even for the time with female dramatic roles. 
 Marlowe’s urgent sensuality, more often present than his misogyny 
 and nearly always incipient, shows in many ways, including the ap¬ 
 parent readiness of his imagination to eroticize, and perhaps above 
 all in the sheer corporeality of his imagined world. In that world 
 the human body of either gender is the most insistently corporeal of 
 objects: it realizes with peculiar provocativeness the renascent and 
 newly problematic (because newly secular) appreciation of the body 
 that had come up from the Italy of Botticelli and Michelangelo to an 
 England comparatively starved for pictures and statues of nudes. 
 
 The most provocative and subversive component of Marlowe’s 
 sexuality, however, is the preference flaunted in the vivid homoeroti¬ 
 cism of Hero and Leander, in the love of Edward and Gaveston in 
 Edward II, and at other points in his work such as the opening scene 
 of Dido, Queen of Carthage with Jupiter dandling Ganymede on his 
 knee. Marlowe may also have expressed his sexual preference in the 
 claim “That all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools,” 
 attributed to him by Richard Baines in his list of charges against Mar¬ 
 lowe sent to the queen three days after Marlowe’s death. In “Sodomy 
 and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe,” Jonathan Goldberg 
 treats some of the difficulties this last piece of evidence presents, 
 which include the possibility that it was fabricated as part of a gov¬ 
 ernment action.^ Since, as has seemed at least possible to many recent 
 commentators, Marlowe’s very death may have been a government- 
 ordered assassination, we need put no great faith in the disinterested 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 129 
 
 accuracy of Baines’s report, which was clearly intended to discredit 
 at least. Even as a fabrication, however, it bears some weight since 
 its plausibility may be assumed. As with the anticlerical and sacrile¬ 
 gious remarks Baines also attributes to Marlowe, so with the remark 
 about tobacco and boys: there is reason to suspect that Marlowe had 
 behaved in ways that made it seem he could well have made the re¬ 
 mark, whether or not he actually did make it. Baines’s report, then, if 
 not evidence of Marlowe’s homoerotic stance, exemplifies the treat¬ 
 ment of such “evidence”: that is, Baines’s or his superiors’ confidence 
 that pederasty (like any other homosexual practice) would discredit 
 Marlowe manifests a stance apparent in the commentary on Marlowe 
 (and writers such as Richard Barnfield) from the Renaissance to the 
 present. With due acknowledgment that this stance toward “homo¬ 
 sexuality” varies with time in weight and tenability, it appears in 
 criticism past and present, antipathetic and ostensibly tolerant.’ 
 
 A second way of processing Marlowe’s sexuality is by ignoring it. 
 This has been the most common response, both of detractors and pro¬ 
 ponents, from shortly after Marlowe’s death to the present. Some de¬ 
 tractors have ignored Marlowe’s sexuality as part of a general down¬ 
 playing of him, or because the subject in their opinions is per se 
 inappropriate for discussion, or even because they prefer not to deni¬ 
 grate homosexuality. Most of the ignoring of Marlowe’s sexuality, 
 however, has been at the hands of his champions and proponents. 
 In some cases they have doubtless shared the detractors’ reluctance, 
 for reasons of propriety, to discuss the matter at all; some must have 
 been inclined to save Marlowe from the “taint” he had paraded in 
 self-advertisement and self-destructiveness. Editors in particular have 
 followed this line, usually providing in notes and commentary a kind 
 of bowdlerized-into-wonderland Marlowe: nor does any edition to 
 date yet take significant cognizance of Marlowe’s sexuality. While 
 the recent climate of criticism has made it less easy to paper over 
 Marlowe’s sexuality, we still have a widespread inability or refusal 
 to grant its pervasive importance in his life and work, and in his re¬ 
 ception. When that importance is granted, even now, it may be with 
 the most surprising indirectness. Michael Goldman, one of Marlowe’s 
 most influential recent commentators, says almost nothing directly 
 
130 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 about Marlowe’s minority sexuality, while indirectly acknowledging 
 it—flaunting it, even—^with the “ravished” acting style he recom¬ 
 mends for Marlowe’s drama.'' 
 
 A third possible treatment of Marlowe’s sexuality is to acknowl¬ 
 edge it and its importance in an unprejudicial response to his work. 
 To an extent we can see this treatment in the wave of homoerotic 
 and largely Ovidian poetry that sweeps through the 1590s, which in¬ 
 cludes Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and which seems importantly 
 initiated by the example of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. In Mar¬ 
 lowe criticism and editorial procedures, however, some of which is 
 otherwise of a very high order, this sort of response (which I take as 
 a desideratum) appears as a scant glimmer. During the two-session 
 seminar on “Marlowe and Shakespeare” at the 1985 meeting of the 
 Shakespeare Association of America, virtually no attention was given 
 to questions of sexuality and sexual preference. 
 
 As for Shakespeare’s sexuality, while there seems to be more to go 
 on, both in the life and in the works, the evidence is also more am¬ 
 biguous and contradictory than with Marlowe. Apparent evidence 
 from the life includes all the tantalizing facts we have about his mar¬ 
 riage, fatherhood, and long absence from his family, as well as the 
 complete absence of suggestions of any sort of sexual impropriety. 
 Evidence from the work, too voluminous and complex for more than 
 a glance here, includes: the celebration of heterosexuality in many of 
 the plays, above all Antony and Cleopatra: the various sorts of proto¬ 
 feminism and celebration of the female in most of the same plays; 
 the eruptions of what has been called sexual loathing or fear of the 
 female, especially in Hamlet, Lear, and the dark lady sonnets: the 
 loving sonnets to the young man; the narrative poems, one with rape 
 as its titular subject and the other portraying something approaching 
 a goddess’s rape of a mortal male: and a multitude of sexually com¬ 
 plex moments and situations in the plays and poems. Compared to 
 Marlowe’s, Shakespeare’s sexual stance seems to me less misogynis- 
 tic and sexist and far more protofeminist, less aggressively sensual, 
 and generally if perhaps not exclusively heterosexual. Furthermore, 
 still painting with broad strokes, 1 would say not only that Shake¬ 
 speare is more retiring than Marlowe on the subject of sexuality (as 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 131 
 
 on most subjects), but also that the subject itself is less prominent in 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 My take on the evidence, of course, constitutes a part of the cul¬ 
 tural processing of Shakespeare’s sexuality. Given Shakespeare’s early 
 prominence and later canonization, stakes in the processing of his 
 sexuality have been much higher than with Marlowe. Therefore, 
 while in general Shakespeare’s sexuality has not seemed so much 
 at issue as Marlowe’s, and in particular has not seemed so subver¬ 
 sive, still where the subject has arisen there has been a hotter con¬ 
 test for its determination, more strident claims and charges, and 
 heavier ammunition. Here 1 have in mind not merely the shadow- 
 land of claims that Shakespeare actually was Marlowe, or that he was 
 female, but also, for instance, the broad daylight Victorian manu¬ 
 facture of that sentimentalized Shakespeare of heroines fitted out 
 with girlhoods. In our century the Sonnets have of course been prime 
 battleground. Most recently Joseph Pequigney argues that Sonnets 
 1-126 detail physical intimacies in an amorous friendship that is 
 “sexual in both orientation and practice,’’ these sonnets comprising 
 “the grand masterpiece of homoerotic poetry”; and Eve Kosofsky 
 Sedgwick begins her Between Men with “Swan in Love: The Example 
 of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” a subtle and powerful treatment of rela¬ 
 tions among gender, power, and “homosocial” desire in the sonnets.* 
 
 When Shakespeare in As You Like It has the silly shepherdess Phebe 
 quote Marlowe—“Dead shepherd, now 1 find thy saw of might, / ‘Who 
 ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ ”—the directness and the 
 assured lightness of touch seem earned, since in itself the moment 
 scarcely hints at how much of Shakespeare’s energy during most of 
 the preceding decade has been absorbed in a struggle with his mighty 
 rival, before and after Marlowe’s death in 1593. Whether or not Mar¬ 
 lowe is, as some maintain, the “rival poet” of the sonnets, he was 
 certainly a commercial rival even after his death, and he was also (in¬ 
 sofar as the two can be separated) an artistic rival. While clarification 
 of much about their tangled artistic relations must await more pre¬ 
 cise dating of their works in the years near Marlowe’s death, enough is 
 
132 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 clear for us to be able to characterize the general dynamic as notably 
 including Shakespeare’s response to the challenge posed by Marlowe. 
 Shakespeare’s response to Marlowe is characteristically complex and 
 delayed, in part considered and in part barely if at all conscious, and 
 at once a containment of subversiveness and a creation of subtle new 
 subversiveness. 
 
 Phebe’s quotation serves as something of a valedictory from Shake¬ 
 speare to Marlowe. Following it, Shakespeare’s concern with Mar¬ 
 lowe subsides markedly, and appears only in such sporadic traces as 
 those in the Player’s speech in Hamlet, which at “one or perhaps 
 two points” seems to echo the Dido of Marlowe and Nashe.^ Be¬ 
 fore Phebe’s valedictory, however, Shakespeare’s massive engagement 
 with Marlowe shows, as is generally recognized, in the correspon¬ 
 dence between three pairs of complete works by the two authors— 
 the Ovidian poems Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, the his¬ 
 tory plays Edward II and Richard II, and the two plays The Jew of 
 Malta and The Merchant of Venice, the one a kind of tragedy and 
 the other a kind of comedy—as well as in numerous local features 
 of Shakespeare, some of them of great interest. Marjorie Garber, for 
 instance, has argued persuasively that in Hal’s killing of Hotspur in 1 
 Henry IV Shakespeare represents his dramatic victory over Marlowe.^ 
 
 As 1 maintain in Shakespeare’s Mercutio, using the character of 
 Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet as a partial simulacrum of Marlowe, 
 dead some two years, Shakespeare carries out a major and hitherto 
 largely unremarked phase of his negotiations with the memory of 
 the rival.® With Mercutio, those negotiations concern, among other 
 things, sexual matters. Indeed, leaving aside questions of the sonnets, 
 
 1 would say that in the plays Mercutio plays the major and indeed 
 virtually the sole part in Shakespeare’s processing of the challenge 
 presented by Marlowe’s sexuality. 
 
 Before elaborating, it may be well to insert a few caveats. My claim 
 is not that Shakespeare’s Mercutio must be taken in any simple, obvi¬ 
 ous, or reductive way as really or merely “a homosexual” with the 
 hots for Romeo, although 1 know he has been read and played that 
 way. Nor am 1 claiming that Romeo and Juliet is a drame a clef 
 wherein Mercutio is “really” Marlowe, nor even that Mercutio’s Mar- 
 lovianness is simple, uniform, or determinate. Nor finally do 1 claim 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 133 
 
 that Shakespeare was fully conscious in using Mercutio for a negotia¬ 
 tion with Marlowe’s homoeroticism. That negotiation seems to have 
 been partly conscious, given such a detail as the echo of Tamburlaine 
 in Benvolio’s announcement of Mercutio’s death, but here as with 
 much else in Shakespeare important operations seem to take place 
 beneath the level of full consciousness.’ 
 
 Shakespeare, choosing what was already a fairly canonical story 
 of heterosexual love for his play, seems to have relied entirely on 
 the version in Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and 
 Juliet (1562).'“ Brooke’s Mercutio is a rudimentary figure who appears 
 at the Capulet ball as a potential rival of Romeo’s for Juliet. The 
 sketched figure, that is, exhibits some of the conventional hetero¬ 
 sexual interest of a young gallant, and there is no suggestion that 
 he and Romeo even know each other. His main raison d’etre in the 
 poem is to occasion the first words between Juliet and Romeo, for 
 after he and Romeo each have grasped one of Juliet’s hands she turns 
 to Romeo to complain of Mercutio’s “icy hand.” Thereafter Brooke’s 
 poem contains no mention of Mercutio. 
 
 Shakespeare’s elaboration of Brooke’s trace Mercutio begins, in a 
 sense, with the erasure of the potential Mercutio-Juliet bond. The 
 erasure is very thorough. At the Capulet ball, Shakespeare gives Mer¬ 
 cutio neither lines nor stage directions, nor any acknowledgment of 
 his presence, not even where it might seem most natural, as when 
 the Nurse informs Juliet of the identities of guests as they depart at 
 the end of the scene. Shakespeare’s Mercutio and Juliet never touch 
 hands or speak to each other, nor does either ever speak of the other. 
 Furthermore, while the play contains several occasions where one 
 might naturally be spoken of to the other, neither ever hears mention 
 of the other. 
 
 By a certain conservation of imaginative weight, the erased Mercu¬ 
 tio-Juliet bond reappears in Shakespeare as the bond uniting Mercutio 
 and Romeo. Their friendship is, of course, a part of the camarade¬ 
 rie that also bonds each of these two with Benvolio, in a version of 
 the liminal fraternities studied by Victor Turner and others. Within 
 that fraternity, however, the Mercutio-Romeo bond is much the most 
 prominent and consequential. Soon after Mercutio’s last exit, the 
 play twice comes close to naming the bond, when Romeo calls Mer- 
 
134 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 cutio his “very friend” and when Montague says his son was “Mer- 
 cutio’s friend.” “Friendship” will do as a name for the bond so long 
 as we recognize that, on Mercutio’s part at least, the affectional state 
 might as easily be named love, and that, while what we would call 
 homosexual desire plays no conspicuous role in Mercutio’s friendship 
 for Romeo, still the erotic and indeed the phallic figure more promi¬ 
 nently here than in any other significant friendship in Shakespeare." 
 
 Given all this, along with Shakespeare’s great expansion of the role 
 of a character whose Marlovian resonances extend even to his name, 
 it would seem that Shakespeare’s response to Marlowe’s sexuality 
 must be legible in Mercutio. The general nature of that response is 
 summarized, mutatis mutandis, in Nicholas Brooke’s remark about 
 Marlowe’s political heterodoxy: 
 
 Marlowe seems to have been for Shakespeare . . . the inescapable 
 creator of something initially alien which he could only assimi¬ 
 late with difficulty.'^ 
 
 While we might not wish to credit Marlowe as “creator” of homo¬ 
 eroticism (any more, perhaps, than as creator of his political het¬ 
 erodoxy), Shakespeare does seem to deserve credit for accepting the 
 challenge of Marlowe’s sexuality, at least in Mercutio. 
 
 The opening of Romeo and Juliet, with Sampson and Gregory talk¬ 
 ing of thrusting maids to the wall, drawing a tool, and having a naked 
 weapon out, is the most relentlessly phallic opening in all of Shake¬ 
 speare’s plays, and in only a few passages from anywhere in his work 
 is the phallus more prominent. The opening ranks the phallus along¬ 
 side the feud as a major theme, and sets up equations between phal¬ 
 lus and weapon, and between male heterosexuality and the violent 
 subjugation of women. At the same time, since the two servants are 
 comic, Shakespeare uses them to call into question the institution of 
 patriarchal sexism, an institution some of whose costs Shakespeare 
 recognizes in much of the play. The parodic heterosexual phallocen- 
 trism of the opening lines, that is, sounds a characteristic Shake¬ 
 spearean note, the note we call antisexist or protofeminist. 
 
 The point is worth making because commentators have sometimes 
 blurred together with the play’s opening its three additional notably 
 phallic passages, all in Mercutio’s speech, and all with the phallo- 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 135 
 
 centrism still more prominent and concentrated than in the opening: 
 Mercutio’s talk of sinking in love, pricks and pricking, and beating 
 love down; his long bawdy interchange with Benvolio about raising 
 a spirit; and his talk with Romeo and Benvolio, and then the Nurse, 
 of love’s bauble, of his own “tale,” and of the prick of noon. Given 
 that in each passage it is Mercutio who introduces the phallicism and 
 primarily sustains it, and given the proportional prominence of such 
 talk in Mercutio’s total of lines, he is easily Shakespeare’s most phal¬ 
 lic character. And several points should be made immediately about 
 his insistent references to the phallus. 
 
 While Mercutio’s phallicism is as aggressive as the Capulet ser¬ 
 vants’, his is in a thoroughly different key to start with, by virtue of 
 his social class and friendships. Furthermore, while Sampson boasts 
 to Gregory of the tool with which he thrusts maids to the wall, 
 in Mercutio we find neither boasting nor envisioned male aggres¬ 
 sion toward women. Indeed he begins his first phallic passage with 
 “And, to sink in it, should you burden love— / Too great oppres¬ 
 sion for a tender thing”—a mock counsel to Romeo against love on 
 the grounds that heterosexual intercourse per se is overly aggressive 
 against women. The roughness in the remainder of his counsel, “If 
 love be rough with you, be rough with love; / Prick love for pricking 
 and you beat love down,” is directed not against women but against 
 love, which has changed gender from female to male in Romeo’s inter¬ 
 vening speech. Nor do we find misogyny or particular aggressiveness 
 toward women in Mercutio’s other concentrations of phallic speech. 
 Nor, it may be worth noting, is Mercutio’s disapproval of Romeo’s in¬ 
 fatuation and heterosexuality at all sternly prescriptive. Rather it is 
 genial and tolerant, and the increasingly sensual catalog of Rosaline’s 
 parts that introduces the second concentration of phallicism is appre¬ 
 ciative throughout. In an important respect Mercutio’s phallic talk 
 reverses Sampson’s. While Sampson talks boastfully and exclusively 
 about his own phallus, and induces the compliant though not entirely 
 credulous Gregory to talk about it too, only a portion of Mercutio’s 
 bawdy, and that not boastful, is about his own “tale.” The other 
 phalli that come up more or less explicitly in his speech are love’s, 
 noon’s, a stranger’s, and Romeo’s. Mercutio, that is, very readily 
 grants the phallus to others, notably including his friend Romeo. 
 
136 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 Mercutio’s references to his friend’s phallus suggest the sexual dy¬ 
 namics of the friendship. The quibbling figurativeness of “If love be 
 rough with you, be rough with love; / Prick love for pricking and you 
 beat love down” makes the sentence exceptionally resistant to close 
 paraphrase. Still, the exhortation is not only phallic but also opposed 
 to heterosexual love, or anti venereal, so that (being rough with the 
 sentence) we might paraphrase it as “Use your phallus against love.” 
 A lightened and, as it were, genially resigned antivenerealism appears 
 as well in the context of “in his mistress’ name / 1 conjure only but 
 to raise up him” with its sensually appreciative but irreverent talk of 
 Rosaline. But Mercutio’s phallicism is the stronger and more appar¬ 
 ent agenda. Mercutio here exhibits a generous and interested attitude 
 toward Romeo’s phallus, as if he has a personal investment, as we say, 
 in his friend’s erection. The nature of that investment might seem, 
 on the basis of the line and a half quoted above, to involve the idea 
 of Mercutio’s taking Rosaline’s place not only as conjurer but also 
 as container of Romeo’s phallus, and it is true that Rosaline has re¬ 
 ceded from active participation with the stranger, her circle around 
 his spirit, to a mere deputizing name at Mercutio’s raising of Romeo. 
 But that fleeting, apparently subliminal trace of sexual desire on Mer¬ 
 cutio’s part for Romeo, which seems to reappear in Mercutio’s image 
 of biting Romeo by the ear,‘^ is preceded by the genially explicit talk 
 of Rosaline as sexually active and attractive, and is followed shortly 
 by the third reference to Romeo’s phallus, in Mercutio’s mock wish 
 that Romeo were a poperin pear, another image that (like “raise up 
 him”) reduces the friend to his genitals, while naming the phallus 
 precisely for its use in heterosexual intercourse. 
 
 These references of Mercutio’s to Romeo’s phallus add up to a 
 highly mercurial stance that combines an opposition to love, an 
 amiable erotic permissiveness, and a phallocentrism that admits 
 traces of homoeroticism. The stance amounts to an invitation, and it 
 is one Romeo is unable to accept. His repartee with Mercutio never 
 seems quite wholehearted; when Mercutio shifts into the bawdy Ro¬ 
 meo hangs back and Romeo’s love for Juliet is notably uncarnal and 
 unphallic. Just as the play authorizes Romeo’s greater allegiance to 
 love than to family honor in the feud, so it also authorizes his greater 
 allegiance to Juliet than to Mercutio. The generally neglected point. 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 137 
 
 however, is that by radically expanding Brooke’s minor Mercutio, 
 Shakespeare gives Romeo’s heterosexual love an opposition other 
 than and different in quality from the opposition of the feud. That 
 is, in Romeo and Juliet, while acknowledging the (here disastrous) 
 power of heterosexual love, Shakespeare uses Mercutio and his ap¬ 
 peal to entertain Marlovian homosexuality as fully as he can. 
 
 To elaborate this last point: through Mercutio, while Marlowe’s 
 sexual orientation is not paraded, neither is it cancelled, denied, or 
 ignored. Rather, in this play at least, Shakespeare in the arena of the 
 erotic demonstrates the sort of mastery that Stephen Greenblatt and 
 others have taught us to see in him, as he admits and incorporates the 
 subversive element, to some extent containing it, and to some extent 
 rendering it still more subversive. Here, in other words, Shakespeare 
 mounts his strongest case against the enshrinement of heterosexu¬ 
 ality at the expense of homosexuality. The strength of the case is 
 in part a function of the force of the general challenge of Marlowe’s 
 example as felt by Shakespeare, and in part a function of the strength 
 of Shakespeare’s general response. 
 
 With Mercutio, then, Shakespeare seems to carry out a profound 
 and nonjudgmental acknowledgment of Marlowe’s minority sexu¬ 
 ality, and does so by way of what in 1595 is still for him an excep¬ 
 tional, even unprecedented, degree of imaginative identification. The 
 identification shows in the warmth and generosity of Mercutio’s fra¬ 
 ternal bonding to Romeo, and in his phallic bawdiness, neither fea¬ 
 ture especially noteworthy in Shakespearean characters before Mer¬ 
 cutio or, for that matter, after him either. The imaginative empathy 
 may account for particulars of Mercutio’s behavior as well, the most 
 remarkable possibly being the wish he expresses to his absent friend, 
 “O Romeo, that she were, O that she were / An open-arse and thou a 
 poperin pear!” This seems to be the only direct and explicit reference 
 to sodomy in the canon.Of course the sodomy imagined in these 
 lines is heterosexual, but its uniqueness in Shakespeare suggests that 
 it derives from Mercutio’s Marlovianness—as if Shakespeare has Mer¬ 
 cutio wish for his friend heterosexual intercourse as it might easily 
 have been imagined, in passing, by Marlowe. So understood, the mo¬ 
 ment marks an exceptional imaginative reach. 
 
 Mercutio, however, is about as far as Shakespeare goes with the con- 
 
138 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 version of Marlovian homosexuality into phallocentric male friend¬ 
 ship charged with erotic overtones and undertones. Shakespeare lets 
 the homosexual Marlowe into the realm of the canonical hetero¬ 
 sexual, not only to give him some free rein but also to kill him 
 off. While the heterosexual lovers die too, their deaths are later and 
 their love is finally accorded the sanction of their society. In what 
 may be the next play. The Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s melan¬ 
 choly manifests some lingering dissatisfaction with the accommoda¬ 
 tion achieved through Mercutio and his death, but while Antonio 
 lives to the end of his play much of the life has now gone out of the 
 Marlowe simulacrum. In The Merchant of Venice friendship is sup¬ 
 planted by undying heterosexual love; then Shakespeare is off and 
 running through a series of plays conspicuously deficient in celebra¬ 
 tions of male-male bonding, and generally without celebratory or 
 even acquiescent moments of the homoerotic. 
 
 Still, with Mercutio Shakespeare has entertained the Marlovian 
 stance. He has shown himself open to an alternate sexuality. The ne¬ 
 gotiation with Marlowe and his sexuality in the creation of Mercutio 
 may well have been instrumental in giving Shakespeare an excep¬ 
 tional freedom from the prescriptivism that must demonize homo¬ 
 sexuality. As is well known, he seems not unsympathetic to the more 
 or less explicit homosexuality of Achilles and Patroclus in Troilus and 
 Cressida, and restricts derision of it to the “deformed and scurrilous” 
 Thersites. 
 
 The imaginative capaciousness and generosity with which Shake¬ 
 speare comes to terms with Marlovian homoeroticism in Mercutio 
 has not usually been matched or even approached in our culture’s 
 nearly four-hundred-year processing of Mercutio. In numerous and 
 changing ways that history has been one of suppression, reduction, 
 bowdlerizing, sentimentalizing, and denial of his fraternal phallocen¬ 
 tric bawdy and of the nature and vigor of his bonding with Romeo, 
 as well as of much else about him. The manifold attack on Mercutio, 
 which may for convenience be termed a drive for his containment, 
 is visible in adaptations, in promptbooks, in editorial practice, in 
 records of performance (including film and video), and in critical 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 139 
 
 commentary on the texts and performances of the play. The drive for 
 containment of Mercutio varies in scope and intricacy from Francis 
 Gentleman’s considered view that Romeo and Juliet would have been 
 better if Shakespeare had left Mercutio out of it altogether, to the 
 ingenious cutting in the 1906 production that reduces Mercutio’s cata¬ 
 log of Rosaline’s parts to her “bright eyes, / And the demesnes that 
 there adjacent lie.”'^ 
 
 At the same time, Mercutio through the four centuries has con¬ 
 tinued to exert the subversive appeal that, according to Dryden, made 
 Shakespeare have to kill him off midway through the play, so that the 
 drive for containment has always been opposed by forces working for 
 the restoration and acceptance of an authentic Mercutio. The vola¬ 
 tile and continuing contest that has been and continues to be waged 
 over Mercutio may be seen as a small but not insignificant part of 
 the dialectic of sexualities. Indeed, given Shakespeare’s prominence, 
 especially in the past two centuries, I maintain that the processing of 
 Mercutio can serve as a useful series of bulletins from the front in the 
 struggle over the privileging of heterosexuality. Before concluding, 
 then, I wish briefly to consider three of those bulletins. While the 
 academy’s conservatorship of Shakespeare brings all of what 1 have 
 said above into the general purview of the subject of Shakespeare and 
 the academy, with these three matters 1 will try to lay open some 
 more specifics. 
 
 In this century, and especially in the permissive climate of twenty 
 years ago, Mercutio seems finally to begin to come into his own, 
 after the centuries-long night of seldom remitting censorship. Franco 
 Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet, with John McEnery playing Mer¬ 
 cutio, was a landmark. Zeffirelli had directed a stage version of the 
 play earlier, and some of what he had worked out there reappears 
 in the film.'* Still, the film manifests some fundamental rethinking 
 of the play, rethinking especially evident in, and possibly originat¬ 
 ing with, the part of Mercutio. One of the important innovations 
 was the choice of an actor appreciably older than those playing 
 Romeo, Juliet, and Benvolio. The age discrepancy works with some 
 subtlety to enlist audience interest in—and perhaps sympathy for, 
 and perhaps anxiety about—“an aging manic-depressive, idling his 
 time away in the company of men half his own age.” The Marlovian- 
 
140 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 Shakespearean phallicism is abundantly present, as in the moment 
 when Mercutio in the waist-deep watering trough raises the shank 
 of his sword out of the water at a phallic angle. The strength and 
 potential eroticism of his bond with Romeo also manifests itself, as in 
 the two moments when they touch foreheads. Nor does the Zeffirelli- 
 McEnery Mercutio exhibit any trace of the un-Marlovian hetero¬ 
 sexual flirtatiousness the character shows in Shakespeare’s source and 
 often in adaptations and stagings of Shakespeare’s play, though no¬ 
 where in Shakespeare’s dialogue. 
 
 While the great popularity of the film clearly derived from Zeffir¬ 
 elli’s playing to the sixties cult of innocent youth with his principals 
 —and the film does celebrate and partly canonize youthful hetero¬ 
 sexual desire—at the same time the influence of McEnery’s Mercutio 
 may prove to have been more consequential. Five years later, for in¬ 
 stance, in the Terry Hands 1973 Stratford stage production of the play, 
 Mercutio becomes, according to Evans, “an aggressive homosexual.” 
 
 Evans’s reactions to both film and stage productions in his intro¬ 
 duction to the 1984 New Cambridge Romeo and Juliet represent one 
 sort of academic response to the late twentieth-century acknowl¬ 
 edgment or exaggeration, in performance, of Shakespeare’s engage¬ 
 ment with Marlovian homoeroticism. Of the Hands production Evans 
 writes. 
 
 Such character perversion, all too common today in Shakespeare 
 productions generally, is nothing more than a meretricious at¬ 
 tempt, at whatever drastic cost to the integrity of the play, to 
 make Shakespeare “our contemporary”: only if the friendship of 
 Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio can be given an exciting nuance 
 of homosexuality does the play become relevant for a modern 
 audience—so runs the directors’ justification. 
 
 As for the Zeffirelli film, Evans disapproves of it as “narrowly con¬ 
 ceived and reductionist” because of its “emphasis on youth” which 
 seems to him to diminish “the larger aspects of their [Romeo’s and 
 Juliet’s] love, its developing maturity and final dignity.” Evans does 
 not mention the Zeffirelli-McEnery Mercutio’s strong traces of the 
 protohomoerotic or indeed anything about the role.'^ His very neglect 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 141 
 
 of it seems a function of his concern that the play be understood as 
 enshrining a dignified heterosexual love. 
 
 Elsewhere in the academy reception has been more favorable to 
 recent performances of Mercutio that counter the canonization of 
 heterosexuality. Jack J. Jorgens appreciates the prominence Zeffirelli 
 gives Mercutio, noting, for instance, that with Mercutio’s death the 
 entire film is “drained of its busy look and festive colors”: Jorgens 
 acknowledges the depth of this Mercutio’s attachment to Romeo: 
 
 There is deep friendship, even love, between Romeo and Mer¬ 
 cutio. Mercutio’s mercurial showmanship seems aimed at Ro¬ 
 meo, and his anger, when Romeo is off sighing for love or making 
 a milksop of himself before Tybalt, is tinged with jealousy. How 
 could a friend abandon his male comradery for “a smock”? 
 
 And E. A. M. Colman writes of the film that “Romeo and Juliet de¬ 
 mands a good deal of critical reorientation if . . . Zeffirelli’s . . . 
 presentation of Mercutio is justified by the text.” Despite a certain 
 circularity here—not merely “the text” but also a particular given 
 critical orientation is necessarily implicated in determining whether 
 the presentation is “justified” or not—Colman clearly acknowledges 
 the disruptive importance of the Zeffirelli-McEnery Mercutio.^” 
 Eeminist and psychoanalytic critical treatments of Mercutio com¬ 
 prise a second index of the part Mercutio is currently playing in the 
 contest for and against the canonization of heterosexuality in the 
 academy. While the MLA Delegate Assembly’s passage of a resolution 
 opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation clearly 
 results from interrogation inside the academy of the received assump¬ 
 tions grounding such discrimination, all too often in academic dis¬ 
 course these assumptions continue to be promulgated as fact. Mer¬ 
 cutio serves as an exceptionally good gauge of this discourse, by 
 virtue of his homosocial-homoerotic resonances and opposition to 
 heterosexual love in what has become far more canonical a story of 
 heterosexual love than it was when it came to Shakespeare’s hand. 
 
 The strengths and weaknesses of both feminist and psychoanalytic 
 treatments of Shakespeare have been widely discussed. Most recently 
 Richard Levin has exposed widespread error and falsehood in femi- 
 
142 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 nist thematic readings of the tragedies: he suggests that the deficien¬ 
 cies derive not only from the thematism but also from a fallacious 
 feminist-psychoanalytic conception of masculinity.^' Levin does not 
 address the preconceptions about sexual orientation in the critics he 
 surveys, but his admirable concluding call for the abandonment of 
 psychoanalytic stances that must make one gender or the other inher¬ 
 ently pathological may be immediately extrapolated to psychoana¬ 
 lytic stances that privilege heterosexuality by making adult homo¬ 
 sexuality a pathology. 
 
 Levin’s concerns resemble mine enough to lead him to notice some 
 suppression of Mercutio in the criticism he surveys, as when he 
 notes the misrepresentation by Coppelia Kahn of Romeo’s motive 
 in attacking Tybalt—not, as Kahn claims, to uphold the Montague 
 honor, but rather “to avenge Mercutio.”If we shift focus from 
 gender to sexual orientation, however, it is easy to see that, for 
 feminist-psychoanalytic criticism espousing the doctrine that adult 
 male homosexuality is either an irrelevance or a pathology, Mer¬ 
 cutio has a good deal besides mere maleness working against him. 
 And a conspicuous resurgence of the ongoing movement to contain 
 Mercutio appears precisely in this body of criticism. 
 
 In “Coming of Age in Verona,” for example, Kahn maintains that 
 Mercutio “represents” the “attempted sublimation” of “virile energy 
 . . . into fancy and wit,” and that he “suggests” that feuding functions 
 psychologically as a definition of manhood.^^ If these slippery and 
 jargon-bound claims seem provisionally tenable, the same is not true 
 of Kahn’s “Love is only manly, he [Mercutio] hints, if it is aggressive 
 and violent and consists of subjugating women, rather than being 
 subjugated by them.” In fact, Mercutio nowhere hints at approval 
 of “subjugating women.” Nor does he hint that a particular sort of 
 heterosexual love is “manly.” Indeed, as Kahn herself observes, Mer¬ 
 cutio “mocks ... all [heterosexual] love.”^'* Kahn’s otherwise help¬ 
 ful essay traduces Mercutio in such ways because he threatens the 
 psychological dogma that prescribes the supplanting of homosexual 
 by heterosexual bonding in the life of the “healthy” individual, and 
 also because he stands outside the feminist reflex division of men into 
 two sorts: those who wish to dominate women and those who love 
 women in a way characterized by mutuality, a division that depends 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 143 
 
 on the prescriptive assumption that only heterosexual men bear dis¬ 
 cussion. Mercutio serves, that is, as a particularly sensitive emblem 
 of the extent to which current feminist and psychoanalytic modes of 
 criticism constitute a new stronghold in the academic privileging of 
 heterosexuality. 
 
 The bibliographical and critical history of a particular half-line of 
 Mercutio’s provides still another yardstick for measuring his changing 
 phallic subversiveness and the varying acceptance and containment 
 it elicits. At the beginning of act 2, Romeo enters alone and after 
 two lines withdraws, hiding himself from the next two entrants, his 
 friends Mercutio and Benvolio, whom he overhears summoning him 
 wittily and in vain, until they give up the search and exit. The apos¬ 
 trophe “O Romeo, that she [Romeo’s love] were, O that she were / An 
 open-arse and thou a poperin pear!” in Mercutio’s last speech in the 
 scene contains, as 1 have said, what seems to be Shakespeare’s only 
 explicit reference to sodomy, but the “open-arse” does not appear in 
 printed texts of the play before 1954. 
 
 The intricate and not yet fully understood story of the disappear¬ 
 ance and recovery of what is now generally, though not quite uni¬ 
 versally, taken to be the phrase as Shakespeare wrote it may be sum¬ 
 marized as follows. Shakespeare seems to have written something 
 like “open-arse” or “openers,” which the compositor of the Bad First 
 Quarto (1597) understood in its reported form and replaced with 
 the euphemism “open Et cetera,” and which the compositor of the 
 Good Second Quarto (1599), probably working from Shakespeare’s 
 foul papers, misread and set as “open, or.” The Q2 reading reappears 
 in Q3 (1609) and in the First Folio (1623), but since it makes no sense 
 it is generally superseded thenceforth by the Qi reading, until a flurry 
 of independent restorations in the mid-1950s. In 1953, Kokeritz sug¬ 
 gests the reading “open-arse”; the following year, Hosley prints the 
 line as “An open-arse or thou a poperin pear”; and in 1955 Wilson 
 and Duthie give the line the form, and thus the coherence, it has in 
 virtually all subsequent editions. 
 
 There is no way to know how often in the three and a half cen¬ 
 turies between Qi and the mid-1950s the “open-arse” may have been 
 divined, but we do know that it was suggested in print at least once, 
 in Farmer and Flenley’s Slang and Its Analogues (1902), not an espe- 
 
144 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 cially obscure work. So the reluctance of editors through half a cen¬ 
 tury to adopt the reading may betoken not simply procedural conser¬ 
 vatism but also a continuing drive to protect Mercutio, and through 
 him Shakespeare, from what was perceived as scandalous, a drive 
 that to the present day maintains the superseded line in one edition 
 in general use, the Pelican. 
 
 Squeamishness about the “open-arse” continues even after its gen¬ 
 eral adoption in editions of the play. In editors’ notes on the passage a 
 nearly uniform silence prevails about the envisioned sodomy, broken 
 only by what seems a muffled pun in the note by Wilson and Duthie 
 about “ ‘or’ as the seat of the [textual] corruption.”“ Eric Partridge, 
 writing during the last decade of the exclusive reign of “et cetera” in 
 editions, glosses it confidently “Pudend,” although in his notes on this 
 phrase and on “medlar” he seems not only to foresee the imminent 
 “arse” but also to attempt to bowdlerize it in advance.^® 
 
 In 1974, well after “open-arse” has carried the day, Colman writes 
 with a comparatively generous appreciation of Mercutio; neverthe¬ 
 less, he too goes to some lengths to detoxify the phrase: 
 
 It is unlikely that Mercutios of Shakespeare’s own day spoke the 
 term “open-arse” here, as both the Bad and Good quartos . . . 
 suppress it, and some such action as Benvolio’s clapping his hand 
 over Mercutio’s mouth seems called for. 
 
 This ingenious bit of hypothetical stage business seems called for 
 largely by Colman’s disapproval of the implied image of sodomy, 
 about which he remarks rather primly: “Clearly, all that Romeo 
 needs to do about so broad a sally is to keep out of the way and flatly 
 disregard it.”^^ Furthermore, Colman is at best misleading about how 
 the two Quartos “suppress” the offending phrase, since the Q2 “open, 
 or” seems a compositor’s misreading or misunderstanding rather than 
 the sort of censorship that explains the Qi et cetera. 
 
 Colman’s expedients with Mercutio’s image of sodomy may suggest 
 what 1 believe to be the case: that the struggle over the canoniza¬ 
 tion of heterosexuality is proceeding in his own thought, and perhaps 
 beneath the level of full consciousness. In his summary discussion 
 of homosexuality and sodomy, he restates conventional reassurances 
 about the innocence of Elizabethan friendship, although here and in 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 145 
 
 his chapter on the sonnets he does admit the possibility of homo¬ 
 sexual eroticism. And a double standard is apparent in his discussion 
 of the act implied by Mercutio’s image: when heterosexual, the act is 
 “anal intercourse,” when homosexual, “sodomy.”^® Colman finds few 
 references to either in Shakespeare: however, while he passes over 
 the first scarcity without comment, of the second he remarks that 
 when “the plays glance at sodomy it is with reticence and distaste. 
 
 . . . Shakespeare seems to have shared in the conventional disapproval 
 of sodomy.”^’ True enough of Shakespeare, perhaps, and perhaps also 
 truer of Colman than he acknowledges. 
 
 Hence the general screening out of homosexual bawdy for which 
 Joseph Pequigney takes Colman, Partridge, and many other commen¬ 
 tators on Shakespeare, to task. Pequigney is openly against the pre¬ 
 scriptive privileging of heterosexuality, and at times he is not averse 
 even to a certain privileging of homosexuality. Thus some of the 
 screening Pequigney finds in Colman may seem as fabricated as a few 
 of the more strained homosexual glosses Pequigney gives the sonnets. 
 Still, partisanship of even the most outspoken sort is an intricate mat¬ 
 ter here, as witness Pequigney’s passing treatment of Mercutio. This 
 scholar, who finds many more homosexual meanings in the sonnets 
 than do all previous commentators together, screens every trace of 
 the sexual out of his understanding of the friendship between Mer¬ 
 cutio and Romeo. 
 
 Because of his lineage and pedigree, and because of the manifold uses 
 Shakespeare puts him to, Mercutio plays an idiosyncratic and com¬ 
 paratively prominent part in the ongoing struggle for and against the 
 canonization of heterosexuality. Since the struggle goes on through¬ 
 out our culture, Mercutio’s part is only a small component of it, 
 and would be vanishingly small but for Shakespeare’s continuing 
 prominence. Nevertheless, Mercutio’s part in the struggle is com¬ 
 plex, changing, and far from entirely predictable, and the same seems 
 likely to be true to some extent of other Shakespearean characters— 
 indeed of any other component of Shakespeare’s or anyone else’s art, 
 and even possibly of any object of attention. 
 
 With Mercutio, while the struggle goes on outside the academy. 
 
146 Joseph A. Porter 
 
 most notably in productions of Romeo and Juliet and in nonaca¬ 
 demic responses to them, the academy’s custodianship of Shakespeare 
 means that the struggle proceeds within the walls at least as vigor¬ 
 ously as without, and of course the walls are permeable to the influ¬ 
 ence of defeats and victories. We in the academy, in any case, seem 
 best situated to read bulletins from all fronts. The task of reading 
 them demands patience, tenacity, imagination, and all other herme¬ 
 neutic skills we can muster, but it can be done, and doing it will help 
 us avoid providing unintentional support for one contested doctrinal 
 position or another. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 By “canonization” I mean what the term means generally in ecclesiastical and 
 current literary-critical discourse; by “processing” 1 mean psychological and cul¬ 
 tural reception, interpretation, response, and other sorts of treatments, whether 
 they be conscious or not. 
 
 2 Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe,” 
 Southwest Review 69 (1984): 371-78. 
 
 3 See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982); Wilbur 
 Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968); and Judith Weil, 
 Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, 1977). 
 
 4 Michael Goldman, “Marlowe and the Histrionics of Ravishment,” in Two Re¬ 
 naissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan 
 (Baltimore, 1977). 
 
 5 Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love (Chicago, 1985), i; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 
 Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985). 
 
 6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London, 1982), 479. 
 
 7 Marjorie Garber, “Marlovian Vision/Shakespearean Revision,” Research Opportu¬ 
 nities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 7. 1 would argue that the moment also 
 figures the same irrationally assumed responsibility for Marlowe's death that first 
 appears as a flicker of attribution of responsibility for Mercutio’s death to Romeo, 
 in Mercutio’s dying words: “1 was hurt under your arm.” 
 
 8 Joseph Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio: His History and Drama (Chapel Hill, 1988). 
 
 9 Benvolio’s “brave Mercutio is dead, / That gallant spirit hath aspir’d the clouds” 
 echoes the “And both our soules aspire celestiall thrones” in Tamburlaine’s vow 
 of undying friendship to Theridamas. 
 
 10 Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History ofRomeus and Juliet, ed. J. J. Munro (New 
 York, 1908). 
 
 11 Ronald A. Sharp, Friendship and Literature (Durham, 1986), treats with excep¬ 
 tional acuteness the subject of the erotic as a component of friendship. 
 
Canonization of Heterosexuality 147 
 
 12 Nicholas Brooke, "Marlowe as Provocative Agent in Shakespeare's Early Plays,” 
 Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 44. 
 
 13 Here and throughout I'm citing William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian 
 Gibbons (London, 1980): see Gibbons's note on 2.4.77. 
 
 14 See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London, 1948): E. A. M. Colman, The 
 Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London, 1974): Frankie Rubenstein, A 
 Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London, 1984): 
 along with Pequigney, these and other critics find various indirect, inexplicit, and 
 metaphorical references to sodomy in Shakespeare. 
 
 15 See my Shakespeare’s Mercutio- Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor (Lon¬ 
 don, 1770); and Folger Shakespeare Library Promptbook, Rom. 29. 
 
 16 See Jill L. Levenson, Shakespeare in Performance: “Romeo and Juliet’’ (Manchester, 
 1987). 
 
 17 Colman, Dramatic Use of Bawdy, 70. 
 
 18 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge. 
 1984). 45- 
 
 19 Probably these traces were lost on him, or on his conscious mind, as were the 
 names of the leading actors, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, whom he has 
 confused with John Stride and Judi Dench, performers in stage productions. See 
 Evans’s edition, 45-48. 
 
 20 Jack J. Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington, Ind., 1977), 89, 84; Colman. 
 Dramatic Use of Bawdy, 171. 
 
 21 Richard Levin, "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy,” PMLA 103 
 (1988); 125-38. 
 
 22 Ibid., 128: and see Coppelia Kahn. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shake¬ 
 speare (Berkeley, 1981). In more detail in Shakespeare’s Mercutio, I discuss the 
 effort to contain/suppress Mercutio and thereby to continue the canonization of 
 heterosexuality. 
 
 23 Coppelia Kahn, "Coming of Age in Verona," in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criti¬ 
 cism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol 
 Thomas Neely (Urbana, 1980). 176. 
 
 24 Ibid., 
 
 25 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. John Dover Wilson and George Ian 
 Duthie (Cambridge, 1955), 152-53. 
 
 26 In Shakespeare’s Bawdy, Partridge’s note on et cetera cross-references "medlar,” 
 where we find the oddly defensive claim that in "Shakespeare, ‘medlar’ means 
 either pudend or podex or the pudend-podex area.” 
 
 27 Colman, Dramatic Use of Bawdy, 69. 
 
 28 Ibid., 100, 7. 
 
 29 Ibid., 7. 
 

 s 
 
 .> 4 i ■ t • 
 
 • vlLul ifi-i 
 
 " " ym 
 
 *'!■ H*' 
 
 C- 
 
 .M^rii'VI ■' ’’ ’'^”' 
 
 ■|‘ j f 
 
 
 "* ' A*iVi»l ' I'l /?■ ' 
 
 l' 'l;'"* ' ii*lf ' '* '> '> 
 
 » f.; 
 
 
 ‘ ' . 1 . .' ; 1 )■ i- 
 
 Vtf> 
 
 H-wk 
 
 
 . V 
 
 -■V 
 
 'J V“f 
 
 
 I'feS ; 
 
 M'P 
 
 ’•■i 
 
 .. ■• ••■ r.' -- 'y V 
 
 gj : Hii’n ',. ' 
 
 
 
 a'I t* 
 
John M. Clum 
 
 “Something Cloudy, Something Clear”: 
 Homophobic Discourse in 
 Tennessee Williams 
 
 ^^roughout his career, Tennessee Williams 
 was attacked from all sides for his treatment 
 or nontreatment of homosexuality in his 
 work. During the early years of gay liberation, 
 gay critics complained that Williams was not 
 “out” enough in his work and demanded that 
 he stop writing around his homosexuality. 
 One gay playwright went so far as to as¬ 
 sert: “He has yet to contribute any work 
 of understanding to gay theater.”' Williams’s 
 response to such attacks was a series of 
 candid personal disclosures culminating in 
 the unfortunate volume of memoirs, and 
 more explicit treatment of homosexuality 
 in his later, often autobiographical works. 
 This new candor led to attacks by hetero¬ 
 sexual critics, one of whom even referred to 
 one play of the seventies as “faggotty fanta¬ 
 sizing.”^ 
 
 The first critic to deal intelligently with 
 this aspect of Williams’s work was Edward A. 
 Sklepowitch, whose formulation was too sim¬ 
 plistic, though typical of early work in gay 
 studies: 
 
ISO JohnM.Clum 
 
 Williams’ so-called “decadent” vision and his preoccupation 
 with loneliness, evasion, role-playing, wastage, sexual reluc¬ 
 tance and sexual excess are in many instances functions of a 
 homosexual sensibility which has been evolving steadily in the 
 more than quarter century since the publication of One Arm 
 and Other Stories. In this period, Williams’ treatment of homo¬ 
 sexuality has undergone significant changes, moving from a mys¬ 
 tical to a more social perspective, a personal, if fictional micro¬ 
 cosm of the wider cultural demystification of homosexuality.’ 
 
 1 do not see such a steady evolution in Williams’s “homosexual sen¬ 
 sibility”: rather, there seems to be a constant attitude toward homo¬ 
 sexual acts, though Williams’s presentation of homosexual persons 
 changed when public tolerance allowed a candidness in drama which 
 Williams had previously restricted to his stories and poems. That 
 change in presentation, alas, was also a function of his decreased 
 ability to convert memory or self-judgment into a controlled work 
 of art. But the constant in Williams’s career is the dual vision that 
 shaped his presentation of the homosexuality he was always impelled 
 to write about. 
 
 Some relatively late statements issued by Williams demonstrate his 
 sense of a split personality which separated the homosexual artist 
 from his work, and they provide a crucial starting point for any dis¬ 
 cussion of the relation of Williams’s sexual orientation to his work, 
 particularly his plays. This one is from an interview with Dotson 
 Rader: 
 
 1 never found it necessary to deal with it [homosexuality] in 
 my work. It was never a preoccupation of mine, except in my 
 intimate, private life.'' 
 
 Quibbling with this statement becomes a matter of semantics. Wil¬ 
 liams may not have found it “necessary” to “deal with” homosexuality 
 in his work, but the fact is he did. His poetry is filled with homo¬ 
 erotic visions and encounters with “gentlemen callers.” Indeed, no 
 poet has so vividly and poignantly captured the tension, excitement, 
 and loneliness of the anonymous sexual encounter as Williams, from 
 the wry humor of “Life Story” to the poignancy of “Young Men 
 Waking at Daybreak.” The focus of these poems is not so much 
 
Homophobic Discourse 151 
 
 homosexua/it/ as it is the peculiar alienation of the brief sexual en¬ 
 counter. Williams’s best stories also feature homosexuals as central 
 characters. The semi-canonization of the boxer/hustler/murderer in 
 “One Arm,” who dies with love letters from the men with whom he 
 has tricked jammed between his legs, is typical in its combination 
 of religion, mortality, and impersonal gay sex which pervades many 
 of Williams’s best stories. The plays, too, are filled with homosexual 
 characters: from the offstage martyrs of the plays of the major period, 
 to the happy, ideal “marriage” of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello in Cat 
 on a Hot Tin Roof, to the writers, artists, and hustlers of the later 
 plays for whom sex is a temporary cure for loneliness. 
 
 Williams’s theoretical separation of his homosexuality from his 
 work is in conflict with his many assertions of the highly personal 
 nature of his work and of his close relationship with his characters. 
 It does not conform with “1 draw all my characters from myself. 1 
 can’t draw a character unless 1 know it within myself,” unless one 
 factors in an essential variable: “1 draw every character out of my 
 very multiple split personality.”* Split personality and split vision 
 are recurring themes in Williams’s work, particularly in references to 
 himself. They suggest not only the multiple split personalities which 
 allow such empathetic relationships with his characters, but also the 
 split presentation of his own homosexuality. 
 
 Part of Williams’s need to deny the homosexual element in his 
 work is an extension of his need for validation as a writer (though 
 he seldom got it in the last twenty-five years of his life). Admitting to 
 the homosexual dimension of his work was a professional liability: 
 
 You still want to know why 1 don’t write a gay play? 1 don’t find 
 it necessary. 1 could express what 1 wanted to express through 
 other means. 1 would be narrowing my audience a great deal [if I 
 wrote for a gay audience alone]. 1 wish to have a broad audience 
 because the major thrust of my work is not sexual orientation, 
 it’s social. I’m not about to limit myself to writing about gay 
 people.* 
 
 While making clear his continued, though frustrated, interest in writ¬ 
 ing for a broad audience, this statement demonstrates Williams’s 
 political naivete: for him, homosexuality was merely a sexual issue. 
 
152 JohnM.Clum 
 
 thus incongruent with his “social” interest. This separation is impos¬ 
 sible for the homosexual, for whom the sexual is social, as Williams 
 implies when he passionately asserts that “I do not deal with the 
 didactic, ever.” For him, a gay play was bound to be didactic, a notion 
 his later work all too often bears out.^ 
 
 The split persona is seen again in a crucial quotation from his Mem¬ 
 oirs: “Of course I also existed outside of conventional society while 
 contriving somewhat precariously to remain in contact with it. For 
 me this was not only precarious but a matter of dark unconscious 
 disturbance.”® While Williams is referring to himself as a social being 
 rather than as an artist, this statement defines the problematics of 
 Williams’s stance as homosexual artist and of the gulf between pri¬ 
 vate art (poetry and fiction) and public art (drama), and the corol¬ 
 lary gap between private homosexual and public celebrity. For most 
 of his career, Williams was extremely protective of this split. Homo¬ 
 sexuality was not the only element of Williams’s personality which 
 placed him outside of conventional society, but it was the subject 
 which in the 1940s and 1950s seldom spoke its name. Williams was 
 privately open about his sexual orientation, but publicly cautious, 
 as he was relatively willing to treat homosexuality directly in his 
 nondramatic writings, which would reach a limited audience (he 
 never until his later years strove for the money and publicity of a 
 best-selling novel), but cautious in his dramas. His caution takes two 
 forms. One is the clever use of what he calls “obscurity or indirec¬ 
 tion” to soften and blur the homosexual element of much of his work. 
 The other is a complex acceptance of homophobic discourse, which 
 he both critiques and embraces. 
 
 This reliance on and occasional manipulation of the language of 
 homophobia is the basis of Williams’s treatment of the subject of 
 homosexuality in his plays, reflecting a split he saw in his own na¬ 
 ture. Williams wrote of his vision problems in 1940: 
 
 My left eye was cloudy then because it was developing a cata¬ 
 ract. But my right eye was clear. It was like the two sides of my 
 nature. The side that was obsessively homosexual, compulsively 
 interested in sexuality. And the side that in those days was gentle 
 and understanding and contemplative.’ 
 
Homophobic Discourse 153 
 
 This double vision, \vhich always obsessed the playwright and led 
 to the title of his last produced play in New York, Something Cloudy, 
 Something Clear, defines the split Williams conceived between his 
 homosexual activity and his “human” side. Even in his confused later 
 novel, Moise and the World of Reason, in which he depicts himself as 
 an eccentric aging playwright the narrator encounters, he fixes on a 
 dual vision: 
 
 He came back to the table and simultaneously two things hap¬ 
 pened of the automatic nature. He kissed me on the mouth and 
 1 started to cry. . . . 
 
 “Baby, 1 didn’t mean to do that, it was just automatic.” 
 
 (He thought 1 was crying over his Listerine kiss which I’d 
 barely noticed.) 
 
 He slumped there drinking the dago red wine as if to extinguish 
 a fire in his belly, the rate at which he poured it down him 
 slowing only when the bottle was half-empty. Then his one good 
 eye focussed on me again but the luster was gone from it and its 
 look was inward.'® 
 
 The outward gaze becomes linked to an automatic, impersonal homo¬ 
 sexual advance while the inward gaze signifies the writer’s now un¬ 
 controllable withdrawals into memory, which form the basis of his 
 later autobiographical work which, paradoxically, depicts his split 
 vision and at the same time demonstrates the loss his work suffered 
 when he blurred the public/private split which was essential to his 
 control over memory and craft. 
 
 Williams’s split vision, then, defines the internal conflict that 
 compelled him to write of his homosexuality and, in doing so, to rely 
 on the language of indirection and homophobic discourse. It signified 
 a cloudy sense of his own sexual identity, but it enabled him to write 
 clearly. On the other hand, as the sexual self became clearer, and the 
 plays became more autobiographical, the writing became murkier. 
 
 The story “Hard Candy” (1954), characteristic of Williams’s fiction 
 in dealing with homosexuality and its evasions, embodies Williams’s 
 split vision and attendant manipulation of language. “Hard Candy” 
 
154 John M. Clum 
 
 centers on the last day in the life of an elderly man, Mr. Krupper, who 
 habitually goes to an old movie palace with a bag of hard candy and 
 a handful of quarters, his bribes to willing young men for their sexual 
 favors. On the day of the story, Mr. Krupper dies while performing 
 fellatio on a handsome young vagrant. Before describing Mr. Krup- 
 per’s fatal visit to the movie theater, Williams offers this peculiar 
 rejoinder: 
 
 In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be neces¬ 
 sary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too 
 coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work of such brevity. 
 The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enor¬ 
 mously wide context of that life, are softened and qualified by 
 it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, 
 some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide 
 the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence 
 in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself. When I 
 say that there was a certain mystery in the life of Mr. Krupper, 
 I am beginning to approach those things in the only way possible 
 without a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy and 
 which would only falsify the story. 
 
 To have hatred and contempt for a person . . . calls for the 
 assumption that you know practically everything of any signifi¬ 
 cance about him. If you admit that he is a mystery, you admit 
 that the hostility may be unjust." 
 
 Mr. Krupper’s “mystery” is contained in his afternoon visits to the 
 Joy Rio movie theater; his sexual encounters there with poor, beau¬ 
 tiful (of course) young men are acts which would brand him in the 
 eyes of most people as a “dirty old man” or worse. Williams’s re¬ 
 joinder both shows his sympathy and understanding of his audience’s 
 sensibilities and prejudices, and plays with those prejudices. The lan¬ 
 guage of mystery and evasion allows him to write about the forbidden 
 in a sympathetic, even subversive way. That mystery, however, is 
 also clothed in harsh authorial judgment, which places the narrator 
 in a superior position to his central character and allies him with 
 the “average reader’s” moral judgment. As Mr. Krupper approaches 
 the Joy Rio theater, the narrator describes it as “the place where the 
 
Homophobic Discourse 155 
 
 mysteries of his nature are to be made unpleasantly manifest to us.”‘^ 
 Williams is both compassionate and judgmental: the story is both 
 grotesque and touching. The “mysteries,” however natural, are “un¬ 
 pleasant.” 
 
 This dual vision functions in a number of ways in the story. There 
 is the split between the physical grotesqueness and disease of the 
 subject, which implies a connection between disease/ugliness and 
 homosexual desire, and the shadowy beauty of the object of that 
 desire. More important, the story embodies an intense consciousness 
 of the split between the public persona and the private actor central 
 to Williams’s treatment of homosexuality: 
 
 When around midnight the lights of the Joy Rio were brought 
 up for the last time that evening, the body of Mr. Krupper was 
 discovered in his remote box of the theater with his knees on the 
 floor and his ponderous torso wedged between two wobbly gilt 
 chairs as if he had expired in an attitude of prayer. The notice 
 of the old man’s death was given unusual prominence for the 
 obituary of someone who had no public character and whose 
 private character was so peculiarly low. But evidently the pri¬ 
 vate character of Mr. Krupper was to remain anonymous in the 
 memories of those anonymous persons who had enjoyed or prof¬ 
 ited from his company in the tiny box at the Joy Rio, for the 
 notice contained no mention of anything of such a special na¬ 
 ture. It was composed by a spinsterly reporter who had been 
 impressed by the sentimental values of a seventy year old retired 
 merchant dying of thrombosis at a cowboy thriller with a split 
 bag of hard candies in his pocket and the floor about him lit¬ 
 tered with sticky wrappers, some of which even adhered to the 
 shoulders and sleeves of his jacket.'^ 
 
 Mr. Krupper dies in a public place while engaged in a very pri¬ 
 vate act that is never in any way literally described in a story which 
 is a model of playful circumspection. Yet the gay reader immedi¬ 
 ately recognizes the significance of Mr. Krupper’s position and the 
 act of worship it denotes, as he understands the sticky papers from 
 the candies which are stuck to Mr. Krupper’s shoulders and sleeves. 
 Characteristically for Williams, an act of pederasty satisfies two hun- 
 
156 John M. Clum 
 
 gers simultaneously; the sexual hunger of the older man and the 
 real hunger of the boy he feeds. (This pederasty/hunger nexus will 
 reach its extreme in Suddenly Last Summer when the hungry, naked 
 boys Sebastian Venable sexually exploits literally eat him.) In what 
 amounts to a sexual pun underscored by the young cousin’s final line 
 in the story—“. . . the old man choked to death on our hard candy!” 
 —hard candy represents both hunger of the phallus and of the stom¬ 
 ach.But Mr. Krupper, unlike Williams, is also private, anonymous 
 in the audience of a theater, not the public creator of theatrical and 
 cinematic fantasies. Krupper is allowed an anonymity and mystery 
 forbidden his creator whose late autobiographical work fixes on the 
 unknown, still anonymous, private writer/homosexual. 
 
 The young cousin’s final line speaks to the public misunderstanding 
 of the private act. To the obituary writer, the old man’s death was 
 the sentimental extinction of a man with a sweet tooth and a love for 
 westerns. To the child, a hated old man choked on the products of the 
 family business. The real meaning of the death is a secret between 
 the dead Mr. Krupper and the young men who shared his box at 
 the Joy Rio. It is private and mysterious, reinforcing and embodying 
 Williams’s little treatise on mystery. Yet we also have the judgment 
 of the narrator, the only reliable witness, who tells us that Krup- 
 per’s “private character” was “peculiarly low.” In making this harsh 
 judgment on his own creation, the narrator both validates Krupper’s 
 story by telling it, and colludes with his “straight” reader by judging 
 it harshly. 
 
 As the authorial judgment keeps Williams on the side of his reader, 
 so the smokescreen of mystery, created with what Williams calls 
 “obscurity or indirection,” allows him to turn Mr. Krupper’s death 
 into something both tawdry and beautiful. While acknowledging his 
 reader’s possible scruples and prejudices, he manipulates them, luring 
 his reader to see Mr. Krupper’s life and death as at least pathetic. Still, 
 Williams allows no space in this story for alternatives to Mr. Krup¬ 
 per’s Joy Rio meetings. Homosexual encounters are furtive, imper¬ 
 sonal appeasements of hunger. The operative word is “anonymous,” 
 matching Krupper’s nonexistent public character. It is interesting to 
 note as well that Krupper’s partners enjoyed or profited from their 
 encounters with him. 
 
Homophobic Discourse 157 
 
 The devices Williams uses in “Hard Candy” are much more typical 
 of his plays than of his fiction. One can see a miniversion of the 
 public/private problem in Blanche’s monologue about her husband in 
 A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche tells of “coming suddenly into a 
 room that 1 thought was empty — which wasn’t empty, but had two 
 people in it . . . the boy 1 had married and an older man who had 
 been his friend for years.” This extremely discreet picture of Blanche’s 
 discovery of her husband’s private homosexuality is followed by her 
 public reaction to it on a crowded dance floor: “1 saw! 1 know! You 
 disgust me . . . ,” and then by his public act of suicide.'^ Once made 
 public, Alan’s homosexuality becomes unbearable for him: he cannot 
 deal with public disapproval. 
 
 Suddenly Last Summer weaves an interesting set of variations on 
 the theme of exposure for the homosexual artist. Sebastian Venable 
 has always been a private artist, wishing to be “unknown outside of 
 a small coterie.” The privacy of Sebastian’s art is a corollary to his 
 sense that his art is his expression of his religious vision; for the rest 
 of his experience, living was enough: “his life was his occupation.”*^ 
 Yet that life was to be even more private than his work: “He dreaded, 
 abhorred! — false values that come from being publicly known, from 
 fame, from personal — exploitation.”*^ But Sebastian’s private life 
 became a public matter when his cousin/wife witnessed his death 
 and devouring at the hands of adolescent boys Sebastian had sexu¬ 
 ally exploited. To protect Sebastian’s privacy, his mother will have 
 Sebastian’s widow lobotomized. 
 
 Homosexuality in Suddenly Last Summer is linked with Sebastian’s 
 brutal, carnivorous sense of life, but it is also linked with Williams’s 
 private sexual proclivities. Sebastian connects sex with appetite: 
 
 Cousin Sebastian said he was famished for blonds, he was fed up 
 with the dark ones and was famished for blonds. . . . [T]hat’s how 
 he talked about people, as if they were — items on a menu — .** 
 
 Donald Spoto argues convincingly for a strong autobiographical ele¬ 
 ment in Suddenly Last Summer, nowhere clearer than in this speech. 
 While in Italy in 1948, Williams wrote Donald Windham: “[Prokosch] 
 says that Florence is full of blue-eyed blonds that are very tender 
 hearted and ‘not at all mercenary’. We were both getting an appetite 
 
158 JohnM.CIum 
 
 for blonds as the Roman gentry are all sort of dusky types.” Sebas¬ 
 tian’s unfeeling sexual exploitation is as much a dramatization of the 
 playwright as is Sebastian’s pill-popping and confused sense of private 
 and public personae. 
 
 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, written around the same time as “Hard 
 Candy,” is the most vivid dramatic embodiment of Williams’s mixed 
 signals regarding homosexuality and his obsession with public expo¬ 
 sure. Cat takes place in the bedroom once occupied by Jack Straw 
 and Peter Ochello, a room dominated by the large double bed the 
 lovers shared for thirty years. The plantation the ailing Big Daddy 
 now controls, and which is now being fought over by his potential 
 heirs, was inherited from Straw and Ochello. In ways both financial 
 and sexual, the legacy of these two lovers lies at the heart of the 
 play, and the love of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello stands as a counter 
 to the compromised heterosexual relationships we see played out. 
 Their relationship, the reader is told in the stage directions, “must 
 have involved a tenderness which was uncommon, yet the audi¬ 
 ence never hears the relationship spoken of in positive terms. Straw 
 and Ochello do not carry the freight of negative stereotypes other 
 Williams homosexuals carry: they are not frail like Blanche duBois’s 
 suicidal husband: nor voracious pederasts like Sebastian Venable, the 
 poet-martyr of Suddenly Last Summer; nor are they self-hating like 
 Skipper, the other homosexual ghost in Cat. Yet, beyond the stage 
 directions, there is no positive language for Straw and Ochello, who 
 become in the action of the play the targets for Brick’s homophobic 
 diatribes. 
 
 Straw and Ochello’s heir was Big Daddy Pollitt, the cigar-smoking, 
 virile patriarch who admits to loving only two things, his “twenty- 
 eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the Valley Nile!”^' 
 and his handsome, ex-athlete son. Brick, who has turned into a 
 drunken recluse since the death of his best friend, Skipper. The cen¬ 
 tral scene in the play is a violent confrontation between patriarch and 
 troubled son in which Big Daddy tries to get at the truth of Brick’s 
 relationship with Skipper. 
 
 Williams’s stage direction tells the reader that Big Daddy “leaves a 
 lot unspoken” as he tells Brick of his young years as a hobo and of 
 being taken in and given a job by Jack Straw and Peter Ochello.” The 
 implication of the stage direction, and other hints Big Daddy gives 
 
Homophobic Discourse 159 
 
 in the scene, is that homosexual behavior is not alien to Big Daddy, 
 who “knocked around in [his] time.” Yet Brick is so terrified of being 
 called “queer” that he cannot listen to what his father is trying to tell 
 him: 
 
 BIG daddy: ... 1 bummed, I bummed this country till I was — 
 brick: Whose suggestion, who else’s suggestion is it? 
 
 BIG daddy: Slept in hobo jungles and railroad Y’s and flophouses in 
 all cities before I — 
 
 BRICK: Oh, you think so, too, you call me your son and a queer. Oh! 
 Maybe that’s why you put Maggie and me in this room that was 
 Jack Straw’s and Peter Ochello’s, in which that pair of old sisters 
 slept in a double bed where both of ’em died! 
 
 BIG daddy: Now just don’t go throwing rocks at —” 
 
 The exchange is a brilliant reversal of expectation: the object of sus¬ 
 picion will not listen to expressions of understanding and tolerance, 
 countering them with homophobic ranting. Brick is obsessed, terri¬ 
 fied of being called a “queer,” and conscious of the irony of being ex¬ 
 pected to perform sexually in Straw and Ochello’s bed. Big Daddy will 
 allow no attacks on Straw and Ochello, but his defense is interrupted 
 by the appearance of Reverend looker, "the living embodiment of the 
 pious, conventional lie,’’ an interruption that suggests that it is the 
 pious conventional lie that forbids defense of Straw and Ochello.^'* 
 The interruption is Williams’s choice: it allows Brick’s homophobic 
 discourse to dominate the scene. In addition to “queer[s]” and “old 
 sisters,” Brick speaks of “sodomy,” “dirty things,” “dirty old men,” 
 “ducking [sic] sissies,” “unnatural thing,” and "fairies." Brick’s accep¬ 
 tance of the pious conventional lie is heard in statements which sound 
 like a caricature of the voice of pious respectability: “Big Daddy, you 
 shock me. Big Daddy, you, you — shock me! Talkin’ so — casually! 
 — about a — thing like that.” Yet his stated reason for his shock is 
 not moral, religious, or psychological; it is public opinion: “Don’t 
 you know how people feel about things like that? How, how disgusted 
 they are by things like that?”“ Homosexuality to Brick is terrifying 
 because it is inevitably public. 
 
 Brick’s homophobia is part of his sexual/emotional malaise. He is 
 painfully aware that his nonsexual, nominal marriage to Maggie is 
 a far cry from the total relationship the bed signifies. Brick occupies 
 
160 John M. Clum 
 
 a perilous middle state: he does not love his wife, with whom he 
 claims never to have gotten any closer “than two people just get in 
 bed which is not much closer than two cats on a — fence humping,”^® 
 an echo of Big Daddy’s loveless sex with Big Mama and an expression 
 of Brick’s inability to combine sex and friendship or love. Yet he 
 is horrified at the thought of a sexual dimension of his friendship 
 with Skipper: “Why can’t exceptional friendship, real, real, deep, 
 deep friendship between two men be respected as something clean 
 and decent without being thought of as fairies.’’^^ 
 
 Ironically, Maggie, Brick’s frustrated wife, understands that Brick’s 
 friendship with Skipper “was one of those beautiful, ideal things they 
 tell you about in Greek legends, it couldn’t be anything else, you 
 being you, and that’s what made it so awful, because it was love that 
 never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked 
 about plainly.’’^® Maggie knows that it is Brick’s “ass-aching Puritan¬ 
 ism” that puts him in such an unhappy position—that he would be 
 better off if he had the courage to have a complete relationship with 
 Skipper. But Skipper is dead as a result of his own internalized homo¬ 
 phobia, and Brick has, as Big Daddy cogently puts it, “dug the grave 
 of [his] friend and kicked him in it! — before you’d face truth with 
 him!” ” 
 
 The bed of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello represents an unstated 
 ideal relationship which seems unattainable for the heterosexual mar¬ 
 riages in Williams’s play. In positing this ideal, the play is subver¬ 
 sive for its time, yet the love of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello never 
 seems a real possibility for homosexuals either. It is, to coin a phrase 
 from Simon Gray’s Butley, more a figure of speech than a matter of 
 fact, and a rather paradoxical figure of speech at that, since the only 
 positive words used to describe the relationship are silent hints in the 
 stage directions. The only operative terminology for homosexuals the 
 play allows is Brick’s homophobic discourse. 
 
 Just at the moment that Big Daddy’s dialogue with Brick reaches 
 the crucial issue of Brick’s relationship with Skipper, Williams offers 
 a lengthy stage direction which echoes the rejoinder found in “Hard 
 Candy”: 
 
 The thing they’re discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of 
 
 Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick’s side, is the inadmissible 
 
Homophobic Discourse 161 
 
 thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that 
 if it existed it had to be disavowed to “keep face” in the world 
 they lived in, may be at the heart of the “mendacity” that Brick 
 drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. 
 Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most 
 important. The bird that 1 hope to catch in the net of this play is 
 not the solution of one man’s psychological problem. I’m trying 
 to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that 
 cloudy, flickering, evanescent — fiercely charged! — interplay of 
 five human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some 
 mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, 
 just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of 
 character in life, even in one’s own character to himself. This 
 does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe 
 as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer 
 him away from “pat” conclusions, facile definitions which make 
 a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience.” 
 
 Williams begins this statement with a definite interpretation of 
 Brick’s panic that places responsibility on the false values of Brick’s 
 world, then hedges his bets by qualifying his interpretation, then 
 moves the focus away from Brick to the problems of five people, 
 and finally dismisses definite interpretations altogether in the name 
 of “mystery.” The last sentence of Williams’s little treatise thickens 
 the smokescreen: he wants to offer the truth of human experience 
 without facile conclusions or pat definitions. Fair enough. But he 
 seems to worry about such things only when homosexuality rears its 
 problematic head. Of course, his printed warning is not shared by his 
 audience, only his readers, but it allows him to proceed with a scene 
 about homosexuality while denying that that is what he is doing. 
 At the end of his statement, he directs that the scene between Big 
 Daddy and Brick be "palpable in what is left unspoken.” His concern 
 for the unspoken dominates this scene, and what is unspoken here 
 and in the rest of the play is the positive force of the love of Jack 
 Straw and Peter Ochello and the unrealized possibility it represents 
 of a nonhomophobic discourse. 
 
 Love is not an operative term for the men in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 
 It is a word used only by Maggie and Big Mama—the men can only 
 
162 John M. Clum 
 
 wonder, “Wouldn’t it be funny if it were true?’’^' Not able to accept 
 the love of women, neither can the men accept the unspoken option 
 of sexual male/male love. Nor can Williams convincingly offer that 
 option. The tenderness Williams sees as the clear side of his vision 
 here exists only in a stage direction: the cloudiness of homosexuality 
 remains an object of terror, not of the act, but of public exposure. 
 
 While elements of homosexuality suffuse many of Williams’s major 
 plays, his later post-Stonewall works deal more directly with his atti¬ 
 tudes toward homosexuality. He moves from indirection and poetic 
 image to didacticism and thinly veiled autobiography; the problem¬ 
 atics of Williams’s treatment of homosexuality become clearer, if less 
 dramatically viable. 
 
 Small Craft Warnings (1972) establishes a formula Williams will 
 use again in Vieux Carre (1977): the antagonism between a homo¬ 
 sexual and a heterosexual “stud,” and the placement of a troubled 
 homosexual encounter in the context of a chaotic set of heterosexual 
 relationships. In Small Craft Warnings the homosexual character, 
 Quentin, is immediately seen as out of place in the Pacific Coast bar 
 in which the play is set, not because of his sexuality, but because of 
 his appearance, which announces him as a stereotypical homosexual 
 out of a 1940S movie.: “dressed effetely in a yachting jacket, maroon 
 linen slacks, and silk neck-scarf.” His face, “which seems to have 
 been burned thin by a fever that is not of the flesh,” makes him a 
 brother to Williams’s many aging male beauties, but here the wasting 
 is an outward manifestation of the spiritual dessication which has 
 resulted from Quentin’s sexual promiscuity: 
 
 There’s a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience 
 of most homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and 
 brutal, and the pattern of them is practically unchanging. Their 
 act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which 
 they’re addicted but which is more and more empty of real inter¬ 
 est and surprise. This lack of variation and surprise in their . . . 
 “love life” . . . [He smiles harshly] . . . spreads into other areas of 
 . . . sensibility.” 
 
Homophobic Discourse 163 
 
 The result of this emptying is finally the loss of the “capacity for 
 being surprised,” which is the loss of imagination and, potentially, 
 of the possibility of creation. Quentin speaks of himself here in the 
 language of textbook homophobic “objectivity.” 
 
 Quentin is given the profession of screenwriter, and the experi¬ 
 ences he recounts are those of Williams with MGM in the early 1940s. 
 Moreover, he now writes pornographic movies, candid depictions of 
 sex, even as Williams’s plays have become more simplemindedly and 
 candidly focused on sexual activity. These autobiographical clues en¬ 
 able the reader to see Quentin’s emotional diminution not merely as 
 the inevitable result of a pattern of homosexual activity, but as a 
 corollary of Williams’s fear of the draining away of his emotional and 
 imaginative resources that would eventually cripple his writing. He 
 wrote Donald Windham in 1955, the year of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: 
 
 1 think my work is good in exact ratio to the degree of emotional 
 tension which is released in it. In a sense, writing of this kind 
 (lyric?) is a losing game, for steadily life takes away from you, 
 bit by bit, step by step, the quality of fresh involvement, new, 
 startling reactions to experience, the emotional reservoir is only 
 rarely replenished . . . and most of the time you are just “paying 
 out”, draining off.” 
 
 The spiritual waning that cripples the artist becomes here the inevi¬ 
 table cynicism of the aging homosexual who is so self-hating that he 
 can have sex only with boys who are not homosexual, thus emerging 
 as the most articulate and least interesting older member of the typi¬ 
 cal Williams gay liaison: an older homosexual hungry for the flesh of 
 beautiful, young, heterosexual men. 
 
 Williams felt that Quentin’s monologue is “much the most effec¬ 
 tive piece of writing in the play,” and one does see in it an effective 
 duality.” Quentin is suffering the physical and spiritual ravages of 
 time and mortality, the great nemeses in Williams’s world. Yet he 
 also suffers for his awareness of the brutality of his sex life. The 
 attraction of youth is the attraction of what has been lost emotion¬ 
 ally, and the attraction to heterosexuality is to the possibility of an 
 alternative to the “coarseness” of homosexual activity. Part of that 
 coarseness involves the need to keep sex on a financial basis, a mat- 
 
164 John M. Clum 
 
 ter of distancing and control which Williams well understood—even 
 his beloved Frank Merlo was on the payroll. (Williams saw the male 
 prostitute, homo- or heterosexual, as saintly.) Leona tells Bobby, the 
 boy Quentin has picked up, to take Quentin’s payment: “He wants 
 to pay you, it’s part of his sad routine. It’s like doing penance . . . 
 penitence.’’’® 
 
 Quentin’s expression of the homeless place of homosexuality as 
 one cause for his sexual/spiritual malaise is reinforced by echoes from 
 the other characters, who present an image of homosexuality Jerry 
 Falwell would cheerfully endorse. The exuberant, sexually active 
 Leona, tells Quentin: 
 
 I know the gay scene and 1 know the language of it and 1 know 
 how full it is of sickness and sadness; it’s so full of sadness and 
 sickness, 1 could almost be glad that my little brother died before 
 he had time to be infected with all that sadness and sickness in 
 the heart of a gay boy.’^ 
 
 And Bill, the stud who lives by his cocksmanship with women, who 
 proves himself through fag-bashing—“Y’ can’t insult ’em, there’s no 
 way to bring ’em down except to beat ’em and roll ’em”—at least sees 
 homosexuals as victims of determinism: “They can’t help the way 
 they are. Who can?” And Monk, the bartender, does not want gay 
 men in his bar, because eventually they come in droves: “First thing 
 you know you’re operating what they call a gay bar and it sounds like 
 a bird cage, they’re standing three deep at the bar and lining up at 
 the men’s room.”’® 
 
 Williams, who did not want to “deal with the didactic, ever,” has 
 written here not the gay play he swore he didn’t want to write, but a 
 virulently homophobic play. The only positive possibility for homo¬ 
 sexual experience resides with Bobby, the young man who accompa¬ 
 nies Quentin into the bar. Bobby, Williams’s typical fantasy youth, 
 is omnisexual, able temporarily to equate sex with love and enjoy 
 whatever experience comes his way. Bobby has the sense of won¬ 
 der Quentin has lost, a function of youth; all he lacks is the sexual 
 specialization he calls Quentin’s “hangup.” 
 
 Williams’s relationship to Small Craft Warnings was complex. He 
 saw it, in characteristically dualistic fashion, as “a sort of lyric appeal 
 
Homophobic Discourse 165 
 
 to my remnant of life to somehow redeem and save me — not from 
 life’s end, which can’t be revealed through any court of appeals, but 
 from a sinking into shadow and eclipse of everything that had made 
 my life meaningful to me.”’^ The play was originally titled “Confes¬ 
 sional,” which suggests a very personal relationship to the creation. 
 And Williams, to keep the play running long enough to prove that 
 he was still bankable, appeared as Doc through the last weeks of the 
 show’s run, though, as Donald Spoto points out, his drunken and 
 drugged shenanigans and foolish ad libs “advertis[ed] the very condi¬ 
 tion for which he dreaded condemnation.”^® Ironically, Williams’s 
 performances in Small Craft Warnings were taking place at the same 
 time as his creation of his most antic public performance, his Mem¬ 
 oirs, in which the tables are turned and the public homosexual totally 
 overshadows the private playwright. 
 
 Not ironically, but perhaps predictably, the equally confessional 
 Vieux Carre is a desperate mining of memory and early fiction (“The 
 Angel in the Alcove” [1943]) for material. As with Williams’s first 
 success, The Glass Menagerie, this late work is narrated by the play¬ 
 wright as a young man, here nameless and, alas, faceless. The time 
 is the late thirties, when Williams finally had his first homosexual 
 experiences, and the setting is a boarding house in the Vieux Carre. 
 While the play seems to present Williams’s “coming out,” the libera¬ 
 tion is, at best, conditional. Vieux Carre is the most vivid evidence 
 for the consistency of Williams’s attitude toward homosexuality: in 
 the 1943 story and the 1977 play, homosexual activities are charac¬ 
 terized as “perversions of longing” experienced by the young writer 
 and an artist who is fatally diseased. Williams once again presents 
 his past life and his past material in such a way as to expose himself 
 to his audience while anticipating and affirming their homophobic 
 reaction. 
 
 In his poem “Intimations” Williams states: 
 
 1 do not think that 1 ought to appear in public 
 below the shoulders. 
 
 Below the collar bone 
 
166 John M. Clum 
 
 I am swathed in bandages already. 
 
 I have received no serious wound as yet 
 but I am expecting several. 
 
 A slant of light reminds me of iron lances; 
 my belly shudders and my loins contract."" 
 
 While the poem is about mortality, it also suggests Williams’s sense 
 of separation from his own physicality and sexuality as well as his 
 confusion of private and public selves. In “Intimations” only the 
 mind is public: the body, of which only the belly and loins are spe¬ 
 cifically mentioned—appetite and sexuality—are private and already 
 “swathed in bandages” to cover their disease. This is a regrettably 
 fitting self-image for Williams the homosexual and for the homo¬ 
 sexuality he depicted throughout his career. 
 
 Notes 
 
 Thanks to my research assistant, Christopher Busiel. 
 
 1 Lee Barton "Why Do Playwrights Hide Their Homosexuality,” New York Times, 
 23 January 1972. 
 
 2 Paul Bailey, "Dead Stork,” New Statesman, 4 July 1975, 29. 
 
 3 Edward A. Sklepowitch, "In Pursuit of the Lyric Quarry: The Image of the Homo¬ 
 sexual in Tennessee Williams’ Prose Fiction,” in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, ed. 
 Jac Tharpe (Jackson, Miss., 1977), 526. 
 
 4 Dotson Rader, "The Art of Theatre: Tennessee Williams.” in Conversations with 
 Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson, Miss., 1986), 344. 
 
 5 Dotson Rader, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart (Garden City, N.Y., 1985), 153, 289. 
 
 6 Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (New 
 York, 1986), 319. 
 
 7 Ibid., 355. 
 
 8 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York, 1975), 162. 
 
 9 Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 81. 
 
 10 Tennessee Williams, Moise and the World of Reason (New York, 1975), 45. 
 
 11 Tennessee Williams, “Hard Candy,” in Collected Stories (New York, 1985), 337: 
 emphasis mine. 
 
 12 Ibid., 340. 
 
 13 Ibid., 345. "Hard Candy” is one of two stories ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” 
 is the other) in which aging, diseased, fat homosexual men go to the former 
 opera house, now a faded movie theater, to die while reliving their homosexual 
 fantasies. 
 
14 
 
 15 
 
 i6 
 
 17 
 
 18 
 
 19 
 
 20 
 
 21 
 
 22 
 
 23 
 
 24 
 
 25 
 
 26 
 
 27 
 
 28 
 
 29 
 
 30 
 
 31 
 
 32 
 
 33 
 
 34 
 
 35 
 
 36 
 
 37 
 
 38 
 
 39 
 
 40 
 
 41 
 
 Homophobic Discourse 167 
 
 Ibid., 346. 
 
 Tennessee Williams. A Streetcar Named Desire (New York, 1947), 109. 
 
 Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer (New York. 1958), 15. 
 
 Ibid., 17. 
 
 Ibid., 40. 
 
 Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965, ed. Donald Windham 
 (New York, 1977), 215. 
 
 Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (New York, 1955), 15. 
 
 Ibid., 88. 
 
 Ibid., 118. 
 
 Ibid., 117-18. 
 
 Ibid., 118. 
 
 Ibid., 121. 
 
 Ibid., 125. 
 
 Ibid., 122. 
 
 Ibid., 58. 
 
 Ibid., 127. 
 
 Ibid., 116-17. 
 
 Ibid., 80, 173. 
 
 Tennessee Williams. Small Craft Warnings (New York, 1972), 26. 
 
 Ibid., 46. 
 
 Windham, ed.. Letters, 306-7. 
 
 Williams, Memoirs, 234. 
 
 Williams, Small Craft Warnings, 44. 
 
 Ibid., 40. 
 
 Ibid., 27-28, 50. 
 
 Ibid., 74. 
 
 Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 334. 
 
 Tennessee Williams. In the Winter of Cities (New York, 1964), 62. 
 
•>— 
 
 
 ‘ /v*^**^! *5**^ :m 
 
 vM i - , ( >.*i Tiji.- fiJV**'.-. • 'vAJiTli '^ »• 
 
 
 (f ,1 *‘-.’.!' If■* li.’i 
 
 I «M^liMiJ(CJW6iiWWWO*^ l‘ ‘-'^ 
 
 /. * ■>^*'« Ai''-"'' 
 
 ii-'SSL-^U*' , ' ■' * '■»> .■ .*’ 
 
 4 rt>l ■' ■"-' 
 
 M ^rt diitfi ■ M .'«;-* t'...-'‘’4n«iilii‘A -'iTfr sa^„ 
 
 ».‘nrtl If ^ 
 
 ■, 1 '^ 
 
 If^"' 
 
 
 
 
 . r , « . 
 
 
 ii^ 
 
 • r njj "-! 
 
 • ►t'.f;. •» ■; ■ 
 
 ■' *'■•■ .V| • • 'V .'^t, --* ^ ', • 
 
 .•r 
 
 * IV-'iM t ' 
 
 ', ♦ •; || ,*-^- , >■ ' ' . *' ,,e:. II 1 1 ■■ 
 
 i .A * { 
 
 
 •Itvt-'iw ' ''''■■< •' ' 
 
 ^ id ' 
 
 , - , , . ., .,:. .t . ■•„ 
 
 « 
 
 %■ I a* ® »i ' •. » i 
 
 •fit f •; ., 
 
 I u. 
 
 .:.%■ ♦r.^V»V**'lff 
 
 "l S' -*j’ 
 
 *1 
 
 «^i*, ■* 
 
 .4. 
 
 . V. .■ ^. . f'fiiili“*'i 5>:* •. 
 
 ! ■ -Vf V" - ‘ «» • \_ 
 
 t . ' I *" ■■% ■ ' 
 
 i. vt 4, 
 
 «7i 
 
 
 
Ed Cohen 
 
 Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy 
 to Gross Indecency 
 
 In the opinion of some, English homosexuality 
 has become much more conspicuous during re¬ 
 cent years, and this is sometimes attributed to 
 the Oscar Wilde case. No doubt, the celebrity of 
 Oscar Wilde and the universal publicity given to 
 the facts of the case by the newspapers may have 
 brought conviction of their perversion to many in¬ 
 verts who were before only vaguely conscious of 
 their abnormality, and, paradoxical though it may 
 seem, have imparted greater courage to others; but 
 it can scarcely have sufficed to increase the num¬ 
 ber of inverts. 
 
 IRllowing a paragraph which begins “as to 
 the frequency of homosexuality in England 
 and the United States there is much evi¬ 
 dence,” this quotation from the introduction 
 to Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) 
 addresses the implication that the number 
 of “inverts” had grown as a result of “nu¬ 
 merous criminal cases and scandals ... in 
 which homosexuality has come to the sur¬ 
 face.”' In formulating his response to this 
 suggestion and to the underlying fears that 
 motivated it, Ellis—nominally quoting a gen- 
 
170 Ed Cohen 
 
 eral, and hence unattributable, cultural voice—underscores the links 
 between the “Oscar Wilde case” and the emergence of a “conspicu¬ 
 ous” form of “English homosexuality.” For, while ostensibly attempt¬ 
 ing to deny the validity of the contention that Wilde’s conviction 
 “increase[d] the number of inverts,” Ellis’s text paraleptically por¬ 
 trays Wilde as the example that defines the phenomenon and thereby 
 represents him as a paradigmatic case of the very category that the 
 book seeks to elucidate. 
 
 Without question, Wilde’s trials and conviction were the most 
 widely publicized events of their kind in the nineteenth century.^ 
 As such they were instrumental in disseminating representations of 
 sexual behavior between men that were no longer predicated upon 
 the evocation of a sexual crime that earlier in the same century was 
 still named (often in Latin) as unnameable: “sodomy.” However, in 
 playing upon the word “conviction,” Ellis’s text also draws attention 
 to the divergent and contradictory effects induced by the trials’ news¬ 
 paper coverage. Although the press reports may have given those 
 men who had little knowledge about their feelings toward and sexual 
 pleasures with other men a more concrete comprehension (a “con¬ 
 viction”) of their sexual experience, it did so only by constituting 
 this experience as a “perversion” or “abnormality” for which they 
 could be “convicted.” Yet, since the “conviction” which sent Wilde to 
 prison for two years could not entirely efface his eloquent courtroom 
 defense of his “conviction” that same-sex pleasures were “beautiful,” 
 Ellis concludes by conceding that “paradoxical though it may seem, 
 [the newspaper reports on the trials may] have imparted greater cour¬ 
 age to others.” 
 
 As this brief analysis of the quotation from one of the first—and 
 most controversial’—English texts on the subject suggests, the story 
 of Wilde’s trials crystallized the concept of “homosexuality” in the 
 Victorian sexual imagination around his excessively unique, highly 
 visible, male person(a). Indeed, Wilde was and remains so central 
 to late nineteenth-century sexual iconography precisely because he 
 became the figure around which new representations of male sexual 
 behavior coalesced. For, although the opposition between “hetero¬ 
 sexual” and “homosexual” has become so accepted that it now often 
 
Legislating the Norm 171 
 
 seems to define a “natural” range of sexual expression, it was only 
 during the last decades of the nineteenth century that this binary 
 pairing actually emerged. Making their first significant appearance 
 in the English language only three years before Wilde’s conviction 
 (in the 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis), the 
 words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” have always signified much 
 more than just scientific descriptions of sexual practices. Even in its 
 initial usage, “homosexual” was defined exclusively as the absence of 
 a “natural reproductive instinct” that was supposed to direct desire 
 toward the “opposite sex,” while “heterosexual” was coined by sym¬ 
 metry to denote the “healthy” result that medical treatment should 
 produce in the “pathological” male. In this schema, sexual desire for 
 someone of the same sex could only be seen as a substitution for the 
 real thing: “homosexual” came to imply a type of man—like Wilde 
 —who negated normal “sexual instinct,” while conversely “hetero¬ 
 sexual” redeemed the pathological type by confirming the “natural¬ 
 ness” of the sexual norm. 
 
 Prior to this dichotomous conceptualization, sexual practices be¬ 
 tween men were almost universally understood as “sodomy”—a cate¬ 
 gory deriving from canon law that referred exclusively to a particular 
 kind of sexual act whether “committed with mankind or beast.” Since 
 sodomy was never conceived of as the antithesis of any normative 
 sexual standard, it was perceived to be a ubiquitous, nonprocreative 
 possibility resulting from the inherent sinfulness of human nature. 
 While the transition from “sodomy” to the medico-legal category, 
 “homosexuality,” must be traced across more than three hundred 
 years of medical, legal, religious, and moral writing, the results of 
 these shifts were made most visible only during Wilde’s lifetime. It 
 was in 1861, fewer than ten years after Wilde’s birth, that sodomy 
 was finally removed from the British list of capital crimes, and a 
 mere twenty-five years later that the Criminal Law Amendment Act 
 created the first nonreligious category for such sexual offenses, label¬ 
 ing them “acts of gross indecency with another male person.” It was 
 under this statute that in 1895 Wilde was tried, convicted, and sen¬ 
 tenced to two years’ hard labor, becoming the most famous example 
 —if not the literal embodiment—of the new definition. 
 
172 Ed Cohen 
 
 In recent years the emergence of “the homosexual” as a patho¬ 
 logical figure has received increasing attention from gay historians, 
 especially in the wake of Michel Foucault’s claim that: 
 
 As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was 
 a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more 
 than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century ho¬ 
 mosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a 
 childhood in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a 
 morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a myste¬ 
 rious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition 
 was unaffected by his sexuality."’ 
 
 Unfortunately, to date little research has been done on how the 
 movement between the categories “sodomy” and “homosexuality” 
 occurred, so that recent sexual histories have tended either to accept 
 Foucault’s claims by focusing exclusively on the emergence of “the 
 homosexual” within the nineteenth century’s discursive formation 
 or to dispute this periodization by attempting to locate an ur-form 
 of “the homosexual” at various points in Western history. Flowever, 
 if we begin to follow the transformations in the relation between 
 legal, religious, ethical, and popular representations of sodomy from 
 the time it entered English criminal law and to examine how these 
 transformations articulated pronounced differences in who sodomy’s 
 “juridical subject” was at different historical moments, we find that 
 the emergence of “the homosexual” in the late nineteenth century is 
 intimately linked to fundamental changes in the legal/cultural inter¬ 
 pretations ascribed to this sexual “crime.” Indeed, a narrative that 
 sketches how sexual relations between men were understood—both 
 serially and simultaneously—as sin, crime, and moral transgression 
 suggests that the shifting articulation of these categories created a 
 juridical space within which popular representations of “the homo¬ 
 sexual” could be legitimately written in late Victorian Britain. For 
 it does not seem entirely coincidental that it was only after he was 
 legally determined to have “posed as a somdomite [sic]” and was then 
 tried and convicted for committing “acts of gross indecency with 
 another male person” that Wilde could figure meaningfully as Have¬ 
 lock Ellis’s iconic British homosexual. 
 
Legislating the Norm 173 
 
 During its brief session in 1533, the English parliament took time 
 from its general preoccupation with Henry Vlll’s marriage disputes 
 and its specific concern with such major issues as “the submission of 
 the clergy to the king” and “the establishment of the succession of 
 the king’s most royal majesty in the imperial crown of the realm” to 
 pass the first civil injunction against sodomy in British history.^ Prior 
 to this secularization, sodomy had been defined in strictly ecclesias¬ 
 tical terms as one of the gravest sins against divine law whose name 
 alone proved such an affront to God that it was often named only as 
 the unnameable.® As one in a constellation of liminal offenses (such 
 as blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, witchcraft, prostitution, and usury, 
 whose punishment merited religious execution), sodomy—or more 
 precisely, the active exclusion of sodomy—provided an occasion for 
 the Catholic church to violently mark “God’s law” on the bodies of 
 its “flock” and simultaneously to define the limits of its authority 
 over Christian bodies and souls/ As Michael Goodich points out: “In 
 English law, it would appear that sexual morality fell early under 
 church authority, and crimes against nature were identified with 
 heresy.”® 
 
 Since sodomy, like heresy, constituted a transgression against the 
 word/law of God, its punishment provided an occasion to reaffirm 
 religious “truth” and thereby to reiterate the material human rela¬ 
 tions which that “truth” organized.’ In this context, “sodomy” did 
 not refer exclusively or even primarily to sexual relations between 
 members of the same sex, but indicated a spectrum of nonprocre- 
 ative sexual practices ranging from use of a dildo or birth control to 
 anal intercourse (between men, or between men and women) and 
 bestiality.'® When Henry Vlll’s Parliament made “the detestable and 
 abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast” a 
 felony in 1533, it transformed the broader implications of the religious 
 offense into a specific legal injunction against a set of nonprocreative 
 sexual practices. 
 
 Although the ostensive justification for this new legislation was 
 that “there is not yet sufficient and Condyne punishment apoynted 
 and limited by the due course of the Lawes of this Realme,” the trans- 
 
174 Ed Cohen 
 
 formation of sodomy from an ecclesiastical to a secular crime must 
 also be seen as part of a large-scale renegotiation in the boundaries 
 between the Catholic church and the British state. Indeed, as the 
 first in a series of statutes that recodified as felonies crimes which for¬ 
 merly fell under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, the creation 
 of a legal injunction against sodomy provided a model strategy to 
 curtail the power of the Catholic church by removing its right to try 
 those offenses that directly reproduced its authority." Yet, given that 
 one of the primary conflicts in Henry Vlll’s struggle against papal 
 authority concerned the church’s right to insist that as a Christian 
 subject the king was bound body and soul by the sacrament of mar¬ 
 riage, the choice of sodomy as the first such state appropriation of 
 canon law can hardly have been coincidental.'^ For the criminaliza¬ 
 tion of sodomy would seem to have effectively transferred the power 
 to define and punish “unnatural” sexual practices to the state and 
 conversely to have made the state—in this case coextensive with a 
 king who sought to abrogate his wedding vows—the sole source for 
 establishing the range of acceptable, legitimate, or “true” relation¬ 
 ships.'^ In particular, by claiming for the sovereign the right to punish 
 and execute those convicted for the “vice of buggery,” Parliament 
 (here acting at the king’s behest) not only claimed the right to define 
 the legal culpability for “sinful” sexual practice but also negated the 
 pope’s authority over the bodies and the property—if not the souls 
 —of the king’s subjects. The criminalization of sodomy, then, can be 
 seen both to have introduced a legal injunction that would remain 
 a capital offense until i86i, and also to have consolidated the state’s 
 power to seize and control the bodies of its subjects.'’' 
 
 Less than a hundred years after the passage of this statute. Sir 
 Edward Coke’s Third Pan of the Institutes of the Laws of England 
 (the legendary jurist’s highly influential systematization of English 
 penal law) included “sodomy” in a volume “concerning High Treason 
 and other pleas of the crown.” Coke’s treatise testified to the success¬ 
 ful rearticulation of “the unnameable sin” as crime and simultane¬ 
 ously reapplied much of the offense’s earlier religious interpretation 
 to the civil code.'* As the tenth entry in a list of over one hundred 
 crimes against the state, the section “On Buggery, or Sodomy” situ¬ 
 ated sodomy’s first extensive legal explication in the (con)text of 
 
Legislating the Norm 175 
 
 British legal doctrine’s systematic reorganization, thus providing one 
 of the most effective means for recouping this category derived from 
 canon law. Since the opening sentence of Coke’s account (“If any 
 person shall commit buggery with mankind or beast; by the authority 
 of parliament this offense is adjudged a felony”) foregrounds the 
 state’s jurisdiction over the offending individual who undertakes the 
 act rather than defining the offense per se, it constructs this person’s 
 adjudication as the point where civil procedures subsume ecclesi¬ 
 astical meanings. Hence, at the moment of legal intervention, the 
 sodomite becomes both the person over whom the state’s authority is 
 made manifest and the text upon which the act’s legal and cultural 
 significance is inscribed. 
 
 Significantly, then, the body is conspicuously absent from Coke’s 
 ensuing definition of the crime: “Buggery is a detestable, and abomi¬ 
 nable sin, amongst Christians not to be named, commited by carnal 
 knowledge against the ordinance of the creator, and order of na¬ 
 ture, by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by woman¬ 
 kind with brute beast.” Using the traditional canonical appellation 
 to equate the “unnameable sin” (the “sodomy” already named in the 
 chapter heading) with the named act (“buggery”). Coke’s text elides 
 the religiously execrable with the legally reprehensible.'* Similarly, 
 his formulation seems to introduce a distinction between “the ordi¬ 
 nance of the Creator” and “the order of nature,” only to reunite them 
 as the ultimate ground for legal statute: it thereby enlists them both 
 to legitimate the state’s jurisdiction over the offense and to signify 
 the state’s authority over these realms. That Coke’s reinterpretation 
 reiterates the ecclesiastical form of the objections against sodomy in 
 order to explain a law does not manifestly depend upon them illus¬ 
 trates the extent to which, by the early seventeenth century, legal 
 thought had redeployed both the rhetoric and the authority of the 
 increasingly superseded ecclesiastical courts in legitimating its con¬ 
 demnation of sexual offenses. 
 
 In turning from the transcendental/religious horror of the “abomi¬ 
 nable sin” to a historical digression on its philological and sociologi¬ 
 cal origins, Coke deploys what he defines as the essential foreignness 
 of the crime to inveigh against the very religious authority that first 
 enjoined it: 
 
176 Ed Cohen 
 
 Bugeria is an Italian word, and signifies so much, as is before 
 described, paederastes or paiderestes is a Greek word, amator 
 puerorum, which is a species of buggery, and it was complained 
 of in parliament, that the Lumbards brought into the realm the 
 shamefull sin of sodomy, that is not to be named, as there it is 
 said.'^ 
 
 The attribution of buggery to the Italians plays on the suggestion 
 current by Coke’s time that the Roman church was the hotbed of 
 sodomy. As Louis Crompton suggests, this characterization permitted 
 the mapping of sexual transgression onto national/religious differ¬ 
 ences and hence became an effective means of furthering the crown’s 
 struggles against the Pope’s authority.'® Indeed, the strategy was so 
 successful that it engendered a metaphorical equivalence in which 
 “the Papacy itself [was] a ‘second Sodom,’ ‘new Sodom,’ ‘Sodom Fair,’ 
 nothing but ‘a cistern full of sodomy.’ ’’ Thus rerouted through civil 
 law, sodomy loses its earlier clerical affiliations with heresy in order 
 to be redeployed as a political charge against the very church which 
 first produced it. By the early seventeenth century, it seems that 
 sodomy had become an important element in the (ideological?) re¬ 
 production of the British government’s temporal and religious sov¬ 
 ereignty, reenforcing the state’s right to adjudicate personal, social, 
 and even spiritual limitations on the human body. 
 
 Having first provided this legal, cultural, political, and religious 
 context for the crime. Coke’s text finally moves on to consider what 
 it had ostensibly sought to address all along: the criteria for deter¬ 
 mining legal culpability. In specifying the legal proof necessary for 
 conviction (“So as there must be penetratio [penetration], that is res 
 in re [the thing in the thing], either with mankind or with beast, 
 but the least penetration maketh it carnall knowledge”). Coke’s gloss 
 on this criteria foregrounds the heretofore absent body as the site 
 wherein the offense is written. Announcing a doctrine that would re¬ 
 quire judges and juries to decide whether the body (of man, woman, 
 or beast) bore the marks of "penetratio,” Coke proposes a somatic 
 hermeneutic that provides specific guidelines for inducing the body 
 to testily against itself. Since those convicted of sodomy on the basis 
 of this testimony were liable to public execution, their deaths would 
 
Legislating the Norm 177 
 
 transform their corpses into physical signs of the crime, producing a 
 spectacle which reiterated the crown’s absolute power to seize upon 
 the bodies and the lives of its subjects.^® By linking the offense and its 
 punishment to the very life of the body, sodomy’s status as a capital 
 crime organized the meanings attributed to it as a property of the 
 body itself and as such situated it as “part of a universal potential for 
 disorder which lay alongside an equally universal order.” When the 
 final lines of Coke’s legal account return to “holy scripture” naming 
 sodomy as a “detestable sin” that is at once a “crying sin,” his clas¬ 
 sification comes full circle, making the sodomite’s body the site for 
 the reorganization of the relations between church (sin) and state 
 (felony). 
 
 This legal imbrication of sodomy’s secular and religious signifi¬ 
 cance provides a frame for its representations in Renaissance culture. 
 In Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Alan Bray extrapolates the 
 implications of these overlapping meanings and indicates that sodomy 
 played a complex role in the religious, political, and literary texts of 
 the period. Noting that sodomy continued to evoke religious conno¬ 
 tations even after its criminalization in the sixteenth century, Bray 
 suggests that it retained a “mythic” association which often placed 
 it in the company of werewolves, basilisks, sorcerers, and heretics. 
 However, these meanings were now overlaid with references to social 
 and political behavior, so that they came to signify moral as well as 
 religious transgressions. Coke once again provides an index for this 
 constellation when he remarks: “The sodomites came to this abomi¬ 
 nation by four means, viz. by pride, excess of diet, idleness, and 
 contempt of the poor.” While this list of inducements to sodomy con¬ 
 tinues to play on the religious and sexual implications of the earlier 
 ecclesiastical charge, it also marks them out as deviations from the 
 virtuous self-government propounded by Protestant theology so that, 
 Bray argues, they begin to refer to an essentially moral concept: de¬ 
 bauchery.^^ 
 
 As this moral association became a salient element of sodomy’s 
 cultural specificity, it linked notions of sexual and personal excess 
 to the particularity of a criminal charge. Analyzing numerous ref¬ 
 erences to sodomy in the period and especially during the reign of 
 James I, Bray concludes that rather than providing evidence of actual 
 
178 Ed Cohen 
 
 sexual or religious transgressions, attributions of sodomy functioned 
 as political accusations by underscoring implications of extravagance 
 and irresponsibility: 
 
 It was the Court—the extravagant, overblown, parasitic Renais¬ 
 sance court—not homosexuality which was the focus of their 
 attention. What homosexuality provided was a powerfully dam¬ 
 aging charge to lay against it; at what should have been the 
 stronghold of the kingdom, there was only weakness, confusion, 
 and disorder. 
 
 That the theological meanings of the crime were subordinated to 
 the political context illustrates their continuing disarticulation from 
 a strictly ecclesiastical discourse and their rearticulation within an 
 emerging secular frame. Bearing the accreted significance of its cul¬ 
 tural history—first as sin and then as crime—sodomy became an 
 index for a variety of “excessive” behaviors that were then referred 
 back to the body as their source and their proof. 
 
 The accounts of the trial, conviction, and execution of the earl 
 of Castlehaven in 1631 are among the few extant examples of how 
 this nexus of meanings was produced.^'' Mervyn Touchet, ninth Lord 
 Audley and second earl of Castlehaven in the peerage of Ireland, 
 was brought before an assize of his peers on 13 April 1631 to answer 
 charges that he “abetted a rape upon his Countess,” “committed sod¬ 
 omy with his servants,” and “commanded and countenanced the De¬ 
 bauching of his Daughter.” Instigated by his second wife who claimed 
 that Lord Audley had impelled one of his servants to rape her in his 
 presence (in his own bed) and then later encouraged the same servant 
 to rape her daughter, the trial inspired several popular accounts over 
 the next seventy years, detailing acts of aristocratic extravagance, 
 sexual license, familial violence, and religious impiety that remain 
 shocking even today. Drawing on the sensational testimony presented 
 in the case, the narratives indicate in abundant detail that the earl’s 
 menage had been marked by great excesses: sodomy was only one 
 of a number of transgressions that included rape upon his wife and 
 daughter and the keeping of a household prostitute, but it was the one 
 transgression which merited his death sentence. The representation 
 
Legislating the Norm 179 
 
 of the lord high-steward’s address to the court concerning the severity 
 of this charge makes its implications clear: 
 
 As for the Crimen Sodomiticum ... 1 shall not paraphrase upon 
 it, since it is of so abominable and Vile a Nature (that as the 
 Indictment truly expresses it. Crimen inter Christanos non nomi- 
 nandum) it is a crime not to be named among Christians; and by 
 the Law of God, as well as the Ancient Laws of England, it was 
 punished with Death. ... As to this Indictment there is no other 
 Question, but whether it be Crimen Sodomiticum penetratione, 
 whether he penetrated the Body, or not; to which 1 answer, the 
 Fifth of Elizabeth, sets it down in general Terms, and ubi Lex non 
 distinguit, ibi non distinguendum [where the law does not distin¬ 
 guish, let there be no distinction made]; and 1 know you will be 
 cautious how you give the least Mitigation to such abominable 
 Sins: for when once a Man indulges his Lust, and Prevaricates 
 with his Religion, as my Lord Audley had done, by being a Prot¬ 
 estant in the Morning and a Papist in the Afternoon, no wonder 
 he commits abominable Impieties; for when Men forsake their 
 God, ’tis no wonder he leaves them to themselves. 
 
 Moving from a description of the indictment through a brief con¬ 
 sideration of the legal proofs and then returning to religion, this pas¬ 
 sage provides an excellent illustration of the shifting meanings engen¬ 
 dered by the charge of sodomy. Initially named only in Latin, sodomy 
 enters the text in a legal form which recasts its traditional Chris¬ 
 tian nomination as “unnameable sin” in the language of “crime.” 
 Invoking the authority of both divine and temporal law, the lord 
 high-steward’s speech then legitimates the power of the court to pro¬ 
 nounce the death sentence upon the offender. However, since he indi¬ 
 cates that the crime is to be adjudged solely by the act of penetration 
 and cites the appropriate parliamentary act, he underscores that it is 
 secular (il)legality that places the body at stake and conversely miti¬ 
 gates any other religious criteria for such a decision. Thus, when he 
 returns to the “prevarication” of Lord Audley’s religious practice, it 
 is not in order to reiterate Audley’s violation of the law of God but to 
 use the political/moral implications of Audley’s “Papism in the after- 
 
180 Ed Cohen 
 
 noon” to substantiate the sexual charges against him. In narrating the 
 announcement of the guilty verdict and death sentence, the text re¬ 
 turns to the lord high-steward’s religious admonishment (“. . . as your 
 Crimes have been Abominable, so let your Mortification for them be 
 as remarkable. ’Tis not a flight and formal Contrition can obliterate 
 your Offenses, for you have not only Sins against the Law of God and 
 Nature, but against the Rage of man. . . .”) and demonstrates the 
 overdetermined significance that the rhetoric of “sin” plays upon. 
 
 The rhetorical positioning of sodomy between sin and crime con¬ 
 tinued to shift during the last decades of the seventeenth century, as 
 the relationship between sin and crime itself was problematized by 
 the emergence of popular “projects” to supplement and/or augment 
 legal and religious injunctions against “immorality” and “vice.”” 
 Almost immediately after the abdication of the last Catholic mon¬ 
 arch, James II, in 1688 and the ensuing coronation of the Protestants, 
 William and Mary, attention was brought to bear on “licentious” 
 behavior as an affront both to the precepts of religion and to the secu¬ 
 rity of the state. Drunkenness, prostitution, violation of the sabbath, 
 gambling, swearing, and other “corruptions of manners” were be¬ 
 lieved to abound; their unchecked proliferation seemed to testify to a 
 loss of authority by the society’s great institutions and to undermine 
 the culture’s very foundations. As one tract succinctly phrased it: “If 
 there be no power in the Church sufficient to enforce a regularity of 
 life, and the civil magistrate be remiss and negligent, great confusions 
 and disorder will need ensue in the state.”” Whereas for centuries 
 the Catholic church had maintained a technology (the confessional) 
 that linked the supplicant’s necessity for self-knowledge to the priest’s 
 representation of God’s omniscient knowledge, creating a dense epis¬ 
 temological nexus through which the minute details of individual 
 experience (the “regularity of life”) could be known, the procedures 
 of the Protestant church (which situated the individual in a more 
 immediate epistemological and ontological relation to God) provided 
 few such opportunities for the faithful to inform upon themselves. 
 Consequently, unlike the Catholic church, the Church of England 
 was never able to orchestrate a continuous authority over its subjects, 
 especially as the institutions and rituals of the “Roman faith” came 
 to be increasingly associated with religious and political oppression. 
 
Legislating the Norm 181 
 
 As there appeared larger and larger gaps in what the Church of En¬ 
 gland could legitimately claim to know of each person’s behavior, 
 and as religious dissent challenged even this more restrained institu¬ 
 tionalization, its ability to monitor and ultimately affect individual 
 behavior was limited. By the end of the seventeenth century, the 
 radical negation of Catholicism in England had removed the sole au¬ 
 thority for moral supervision from the church and stimulated the 
 development of a uniquely English approach to moral enforcement. 
 
 During the 1690s, groups of men made anxious by what they per¬ 
 ceived as the moral and religious degeneration of their nation banded 
 together to form the Societies for the Reformation of Manners.Origi¬ 
 nally initiated by “private men”—primarily skilled craft workers or 
 merchants—in the Tower Hamlets of London’s East End to address 
 the transgressions of their own community, the idea for such soci¬ 
 eties quickly spread throughout London and beyond. These groups 
 looked to each other for support and advice, so that by 1701 Josiah 
 Woodward noted that there were “near twenty societies of various 
 qualities and functions formed in subordination and correspondency 
 with one another and engaged in this Christian design in and about 
 this city and its suburbs.”^® Coinciding with Queen Mary’s admon¬ 
 ishment to the Middlesex justices (in July 1691) that the courts be 
 especially vigilant in prosecuting offenders against moral law, the 
 Societies took advantage of the royal enthusiasm for their cause in 
 order to press their complaints. Since they perceived that the legal 
 process could do little without detailed information of specific infrac¬ 
 tions, they undertook to obtain and record such information; lists 
 of their prosecutions included the name and address of the prose¬ 
 cuted, the offenses charged, the verdict and punishment, along with 
 the names of court officials who participated in the case. In addition, 
 and perhaps most strikingly, the Societies actively encouraged indi¬ 
 viduals to watch for and report violations among their neighbors and 
 friends. As Dudley Bahlman observes: 
 
 . . . the members [of the Societies for the Reformation of Man¬ 
 ners] concluded that even if the justices were willing to issue 
 warrants as readily as they issued their order against vice, they 
 could do little without information. Therefore they resolved to 
 
182 Ed Cohen 
 
 enlist as many informers as they could; and to make the work of 
 informing as easy as possible, they had blank warrants printed at 
 their own expense. A member of the society, upon the word of 
 an informer, could fill out one of these warrants and take it to 
 a justice, who, after examining the member under oath, would 
 sign it and seal it.” 
 
 Mediating between the Church, the Law, and the public sphere, the 
 Societies were instrumental both in propagating a new technology for 
 moral enforcement and in attaching this technology to the exercise 
 of the state. If, as Foucault has suggested, the rationality of mod¬ 
 ern state power was formulated along two axes which he labels “the 
 doctrine of reason of state” and the “doctrine of police,” the Soci¬ 
 eties can be seen to have significantly developed this rationality as a 
 consequence of their efforts.^® Since their organizational procedures 
 necessarily led them to inspect individual behavior in its most mun¬ 
 dane detail in order to produce, record, and manage information that 
 could lead to public prosecutions, they undertook the function of 
 policing the populace and thereby extending the range of experience 
 that was visible to legal enforcement. Simultaneously, they legiti¬ 
 mated their actions (often in the face of extremely hostile public 
 condemnation and/or violence against informers) by claiming—in 
 the words of John Disney—“it deserves to be somewhat more largely 
 considered how far the public Interests of Society and Civil Govern¬ 
 ment are embarqued in the Execution of those [moral] Laws; what 
 fatal Mischiefs issue from the Neglect of this part of our Duty; and 
 what Advantages both to the Prince and People from the faithful Dis¬ 
 charge of it.”^‘ The prosecutions by the Societies for the Reformation 
 of Manners provided occasions for recasting the legal instantiations of 
 religious ordinance—from sabbath breaking to sodomy—in the lan¬ 
 guage of “public interest” and thereby coordinating the extirpation of 
 “sin” with the establishment policing techniques in behalf of a moral 
 code for “Society and Civil Government." 
 
 The effect of this coordination on the popular representations of 
 sodomy is graphically demonstrated in documents describing a series 
 of trials that resulted from raids on London’s “molly houses”—raids 
 quite likely initiated by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners 
 
Legislating the Norm 183 
 
 whose agents also testified in the prosecutions—in the spring of 1726. 
 Appearing in Select Trials for Murders, Robberies, Rapes, Sodomy, 
 Frauds, and Other Offenses at the Sessions House in the Old Bailey, the 
 representations of these cases both reveal the existence of a highly 
 developed London subculture within which men engaged in physical 
 and emotional intimacies with each other and illustrate the means by 
 which the public attacks on this subculture consolidated a moralistic 
 interpretation of sodomy.” While the information about these trials 
 and their contexts is necessarily sketchy, the reports in the Select 
 Trials indicate that several informers went regularly to the London 
 pubs where these men congregated and passed themselves off as sym¬ 
 pathetic to their activities. In so doing, the informers obtained not 
 only the names of individual men who engaged in same-sex practices 
 but also documented the elaborate rituals which accompanied these 
 practices.” For example, the Select Trials’ version of the proceedings 
 against Gabriel Lawrence for sodomy indicates that Samuel Stevens 
 (who appears to have been one of the informers for the Societies for 
 the Reformation of Manners) testified: 
 
 Mother Clap’s house was in Field-Lane, Holbourn. ... It was 
 notorious for being a Molly-House. 1 have been there several 
 Times in order to detect those who frequented it: 1 have seen 
 20 or 30 of them hugging and making love (as they call’d it) in 
 a very indecent Manner. Then they used to go out by Couples 
 into another Room, and when they had come back they would 
 tell what they had been doing, which in their Dialect they call’d 
 marrying.” 
 
 While this account depicts the activities of the Molly-house as 
 a parodic reenactment of the sacramental and legal affirmation of 
 reproductive monogamy—and other accounts go ever farther, refer¬ 
 ring to the inner room where sexual encounters took place as “the 
 chapel,” indicating that sexual partners were designated as “hus¬ 
 bands,” and suggesting that after intercourse some men enacted false 
 childbirth, sometimes even going so far as to baptize their “offspring” 
 —the attempt to characterize these practices as blasphemous or her¬ 
 etical is conspicuously absent.” Indeed, even the legitimizing invoca- 
 
184 Ed Cohen 
 
 tion of the offense’s ecclesiastical formulation found a hundred years 
 earlier in the lord high-steward’s indictment and summation at Lord 
 Audley’s trial is largely missing from the text. Instead, the Select 
 Trials’ focuses on representing in detail the activities of which the 
 men named were accused and on recounting their responses to these 
 charges. The one exception to this pattern occurs in the cases of men 
 found guilty and sentenced to death; here, as a supplement to court 
 proceeding, a narrative by the clergyman who attended the con¬ 
 demned man in his final days in prison is appended. Called “the Ordi¬ 
 nary’s Account” and entirely set off by quotation marks, the appendix 
 provides a short biographical sketch and then indicates whether or 
 not the man executed made a public confession of his crime; how¬ 
 ever, while this brief narrative often underscores the dead man’s love 
 for the Church of England, it rarely enters into a full-blown religious 
 reinterpretation of the crimes for which he was killed.^® Thus, by 
 the time the Select Trials were published during the second third of 
 the eighteenth century, the emergent focus on sodomy’s legal prose¬ 
 cution as represented in the narrative accounts of the courtroom 
 proceedings seems to have largely displaced a residual focus on the 
 charge’s religious significance, rendering its popular descriptions pri¬ 
 marily as transgressions against the “laws of man” or, perhaps more 
 accurately, against the “laws of manners.” 
 
 In this context, it is interesting to contrast the representations 
 provided by the Select Trials to a contemporaneous pamphlet en¬ 
 titled Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England?^ While the 
 accounts of the trials indicate that those who participated in Lon¬ 
 don’s Molly-houses were drawn from a variety of occupations (wool- 
 combers, ale-house keepers, tradesmen, cabinetmakers, fruitsellers, 
 teachers, etc.), the anonymous author of Plain Reasons addresses his 
 text to the social transgressions of “fine gentlemen” and abjures the 
 discussion of legal proceedings. Instead his text frames “sodomy” as 
 a description of the degraded manhood that he attributes to certain 
 members of the wealthy classes and seeks to imbricate “unnatural 
 vices” with “unmanly” behavior. To this end, the pamphlet begins 
 by nostalgically lauding the ideal from which his contemporaries had 
 fallen away (“Our Forefathers were trained up to Art and Arms; 
 The Scholar embellish’d the Hero; and the fine Gentleman, of former 
 
Legislating the Norm 185 
 
 days, was equally fit for the Council and the Camp”) and blaming 
 the education which young men of wealth receive for the demise of 
 this former grandeur (“. . . he was brought up in all respects like 
 a girl . . The consequences of this fall are unequivocal for the 
 author: 
 
 Unfit to serve his King, his Country, or his Family, this Man of 
 Clouts dwindles into nothing and leaves a Race as effeminate as 
 himself; who, unable to please the Women, chuse rather to run 
 into unnatural Vices one with another, than to attempt what 
 they are sensible they cannot perform. 
 
 Here the sequence of decay begins with the Man of Clouts’s inability 
 to perform his socially designated functions and then degenerates 
 into the “effeminacy” of his progeny, resulting in “unnatural Vices 
 one with another” when, at a tertiary level, the degraded offspring 
 finds himself unable to satisfy a woman sexually. Thus, rather than 
 being seen as the cause of social decay—as will be the case for “the 
 homosexual” whose social pathology derives specifically from his 
 choice of sexual object—“sodomy” here is merely the rhetorical des¬ 
 ignation for an extreme form of social dissolution predicated on the 
 negation of the “manly” ideal: “. . . anything of Manliness being dia¬ 
 metrically opposed to such unnatural Practices.” Concomitantly, as 
 the chapter titles indicate, the text addresses “sodomy” only as a 
 symptom of behavioral deviations: “The Effeminacy of Men’s Dress 
 and Manners, particularly their Kissing Each other” and “the Evils of 
 the Italian Opera,” suggesting that the specific sexual/sinful signifi¬ 
 cance formerly attributed to the charge has been rearticulated in the 
 legitimation of an emerging masculine norm.^® 
 
 When, during the second half of the eighteenth century. Black- 
 stone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769) recategorized 
 sodomy among “Offenses against the Persons of Individuals,” sod¬ 
 omy’s relation to these increasingly normative cultural meanings was 
 recouped by legal discourse. Included in a chapter devoted to such 
 crimes as mayhem, forcible abduction (“vulgarly called stealing an 
 heiress”), and rape, sodomy—which Blackstone’s delicacy forbade 
 him from ever actually naming—at first appears somewhat anoma¬ 
 lous. Unlike the other offenses listed which refer to acts of grave 
 
186 Ed Cohen 
 
 bodily harm, it is not readily apparent why “the infamous crime 
 against nature” constitutes an assault “against the security of [the] 
 person.” In his analysis of the Commentaries, legal historian Alex 
 Gigeroff suggests that Blackstone may have been drawing upon “the 
 spiritual concept of a person” in determining sodomy’s classification 
 in order to say that “participation in this kind of act is an offense or 
 an affront to the spiritual aspect of man.”^^ Yet while Blackstone’s 
 brief section uses the quasi-religious euphemism peccatum illude hor¬ 
 rible, inter christanos non nominandum and attributes the legitimacy 
 of capital punishment against the crime to “the express law of God,” 
 his—albeit elliptical—analysis is not manifestly religious. Indeed, 
 Blackstone’s inclusion of sodomy among “offenses against the person” 
 instead of among “offenses against God and Religion”—^where he 
 placed, for example, “open and notorious lewdness, either by fre¬ 
 quenting houses of ill fame ... or by some grossly scandalous and pub¬ 
 lic indecency”—would seem to militate against interpreting his clas¬ 
 sification of the crime on a strictly spiritual basis. Rather, it seems 
 more plausible to link Blackstone’s categorization, at least in part, 
 to a normative conception of legal culpability, so that the violation 
 “against the person” can be seen as a violation against the specific 
 cultural identification of what a male person should be. This interpre¬ 
 tation would seem to be further corroborated by the fact that unlike 
 Coke and the jurists following him, who defined sodomy as a crime 
 applicable to both men and women, Blackstone specified that “the 
 infamous crime against nature” was “committed either with mankind 
 or beast.” The narrowing of sodomy’s purview to specifically male 
 practices transforms the crime from a generalized injunction against 
 a range of transgressive behaviors formerly labeled as “sin” into a 
 particular “offense against the person” whose “offensiveness” derives 
 from the cultural meanings ascribed to the male sex of the person (s) 
 involved. 
 
 While it is well beyond the scope of this essay to address the larger 
 transformations in legal standards framing such a redefinition of “the 
 person,” it is important to note that Sir Leon Radzinowicz, in his 
 compendious study of English legal development, A History of En¬ 
 glish Criminal Law, describes the second half of the eighteenth cen¬ 
 tury as the period during which the moral reform movements of the 
 
Legislating the Norm 187 
 
 preceding hundred years were able to consolidate their impact on 
 legal doctrine.”'® Stressing that the arguments for legislating and polic¬ 
 ing morals took on an overt middle-class bias during the period and 
 that increasing numbers of middle-class officials (especially clerics, 
 lawyers, and politicians) participated in “reform” activities, Radzi- 
 nowicz suggests that by the end of the century it had been accepted 
 that certain acts were “so unusually dangerous and grievous to indi¬ 
 viduals, and from their frequency so injurious to the whole public, 
 that they were lifted up into scale, and became criminal offenses.””" 
 The normative notion of “unusual danger to the individual” pro¬ 
 vides a relevant gloss on Blackstone’s interpretation of sodomy as an 
 “offense against the person,” especially when this interpretation was 
 coincident with a marked increase in prosecutions against sodomy. 
 As A. D. Harvey has shown, the number of arrests and the number 
 of executions for sodomy rose dramatically in the first three decades 
 of the nineteenth centuryUsing the statistics from Middlesex as an 
 indicator, Harvey states: “from less than one a decade in the second 
 half of the eighteenth century, after 1804 executions for sodomy in 
 Middlesex came to an average of one a year.”^^ While the specific 
 causes of this increase remain elusive, it appears that the coincidence 
 of emerging definitions of normative sexual behavior (what Harvey 
 calls “the massive reinforcement of sexual stereotyping”) with ag¬ 
 gressive private policing and prosecution by the reform societies (in 
 an era before the state consolidated these activities under its jurisdic¬ 
 tion) was instrumental in fomenting the legal and public execration 
 of sodomy 
 
 The newspaper accounts of the arrest of thirty men at the White 
 Swan in Vere Street, London, in 1810 prove excellent—and tragic— 
 examples of this coincidence.”*^ Apparently the result of a long period 
 of surveillance and a carefully coordinated series of raids, the arrests 
 of the “Vere Street Club” provided the occasion for massive public 
 demonstrations against the offenders. If the press versions are to be 
 believed, those men found guilty were subjected to violent abuse— 
 both verbal and physical—as they were conveyed to and from the 
 pillory, and even those men who were released because there was 
 insufficient evidence to prosecute them were often lucky to escape 
 without serious harm from the crowds which surrounded the police 
 
188 Ed Cohen 
 
 courts. Unlike the accounts provided in the Select Trials eighty years 
 earlier, hotvever, these newspaper texts focus almost exclusively on 
 the public demonstrations against and harassment of the men con¬ 
 victed of committing sexual offenses in the case while censoring pre¬ 
 cisely those details which formerly would have generated interest in 
 such crimes. In explaining this textual silence, the newspapers pro¬ 
 fess their advocacy of standards of public decency; for example, one 
 paper notes: “The evidence adduced against these prisoners was of so 
 black a hue, of so abominable a nature, that we cannot pretend to 
 give any report of it.” And another sputters: “The existence of a Club, 
 or Society, for a purpose so detestable and repugnant to the common 
 feeling of our nature that by no word can it be described without com¬ 
 mitting an outrage against decency.” Constituting the crimes as be¬ 
 yond decent representation, the terms that the press used to castigate 
 the offenders indicate that the basis for the crime’s non-nomination 
 was no longer predicated entirely on its “sinful” nature but also on 
 its violation of certain standards of “decency.” Invoking “the name 
 of decency and of morality, for the sake of offended Heaven,” one 
 newspaper exhorted Parliament to quickly legislate further punish¬ 
 ments in order to deter future violations. Another publicly named 
 those found guilty, calling them “the execrable miscreants convicted 
 of forming a club at the White Swan, in Vere Street, to commit a 
 vile offense” and applauded “the disgust felt by all ranks in society at 
 the detestable conduct of these wretches.” As these phrases suggest, 
 while the penumbra of religious condemnation continued to adhere 
 to the popular representations of sodomy, the force of public condem¬ 
 nation was directed as much against “detestable conduct” as against 
 “a most diabolical offense.” 
 
 r Throughout the nineteenth century, as religious dogma continued 
 to lose its exclusive power to organize public knowledge and as the 
 normative standards for male behavior were rapidly consolidated, 
 sodomy’s prosecution provided new opportunities to legislate norma¬ 
 tive behavior.''® In 1828, an omnibus bill entitled “Offenses Against 
 the Person,” designed to repeal fifty-seven separate pieces of crimi¬ 
 nal legislation and reenact them under a single rubric in order to 
 “simplify them and make them clear”—in the words of the Home Sec¬ 
 retary, Robert Peel—was passed by Parliament."'^ This act reorganized 
 
Legislating the Norm 189 
 
 the statutory basis for many serious crimes, including “the abomina¬ 
 ble crime of buggery” which was recriminalized as a capital offense 
 along the line of Blackstone’s earlier classification. Sandwiched be¬ 
 tween the definition of “a woman secreting the dead Body of her 
 Child” as a misdemeanor and the specification of rape as a felony, 
 paragraph 15 states succinctly: “every Person convicted of the abomi¬ 
 nable Crime of Buggery, committed either with Mankind or with any 
 animal, shall suffer Death as a Felon.” Yet beyond simply recodi¬ 
 fying buggery, the bill also overrode earlier legal precedent which 
 required (in cases of buggery, rape, and “carnally abusing Girls under 
 the Age of Ten Years”) two proofs—of penetration and emission— 
 for conviction. Under the provisions of the omnibus bill, the require¬ 
 ment “to prove the actual Emission of Seed in order to constitute 
 carnal Knowledge” was intermitted so that “carnal Knowledge shall 
 be deemed complete upon the Proof of Penetration only.” While argu¬ 
 ing for this proposed change in the standard of proof. Peel focused 
 primarily on alleviating “the suffering of the unfortunate female who 
 was the victim of the offense,” indicating that his inclusion of buggery 
 with the other two offenses was part of a more general containment 
 of male sexual violence against women. However, this rearticulation 
 of the legal criteria necessary for conviction not only changed the 
 specific evidentiary standards that defined the crimes but also shifted 
 the doctrinal basis for criminalizing the acts themselves. As Peel’s 
 speech for the bill indicates: “It was his strong opinion that one of 
 those descriptions of proof was unnecessary and that it was not nec¬ 
 essary to a capital conviction to prove more than that which consti¬ 
 tuted the moral offense as far as the offending party was concerned.’”'® 
 No longer, then, was sodomy’s criminalization as a capital offense de¬ 
 signed to enforce a biblical injunction against nonprocreative sexual 
 behavior (which was the motivation for the required dual proof), but 
 instead to maintain a certain “moral” standard for individual behav¬ 
 ior. By specifically linking the death penalty to the immorality of 
 the charge—in the absence of any reference to earlier “sinful” con¬ 
 notations—Peel privileged socially determinant behavioral standards 
 as legitimating state intervention on the bodies and lives of the citi¬ 
 zenry and simultaneously characterized sodomy as such a normative 
 transgression. 
 
190 Ed Cohen 
 
 The development of normative standards for (male) behavior be¬ 
 came a critical element in the self-definition of the British middle 
 class throughout the nineteenth century; at the forefront of this effort 
 were the energetic activities by numerous organic intellectuals of the 
 bourgeoisie (doctors, educators, clerics, alienists, parents, feminists, 
 evangelicals) not only to define but also to watch for and to enforce 
 new ideological articulations of sex, age, and class. Since sodomy’s 
 legal definition necessarily mediated between an earlier organization 
 of sexual practices predicated on the ecclesiastical affirmation of re¬ 
 productive monogamy and a newer configuration which sought to 
 enforce certain cultural limits on the deployment of the body, its 
 status as a capital offense provided the point at which these two 
 regimes overlapped. So long as sodomy continued to merit execution 
 —even if only theoretically—its punishment provided an occasion 
 for the state to inscribe the offender’s body with/as a hieroglyph 
 signifying its power to use death in order to regulate the very basis 
 of life, even while it was in the process of creating and organizing 
 new technologies which reproduced a more diffuse, yet more minute, 
 exercise of power over all aspects of that life. However, after 1836, 
 the year that the last execution for sodomy took place, the volatility 
 of this juncture was attenuated, so that when sodomy was removed 
 from the list of capital crimes in 1861, it signaled an effective shift in 
 the legal interpretation of sodomy’s criminality from a secularization 
 of canon law to an essentially normative transgression.'*’ 
 
 This transformation was further consolidated with the passage of 
 section ii of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which cre¬ 
 ated a new statutory category independent of any ecclesiastical con¬ 
 notations—“acts of gross indecency with another male person”—to 
 redefine the legal injunction against sexual practices between men.® 
 Following on the momentum developed by the campaign to repeal the 
 Contagious Diseases Acts which popularized the demand to legislate 
 proprietary standards for male sexual behavior (in order to redress 
 the sexual “double standard” that allowed middle-class men sexual 
 access to working-class women outside of marriage),^' the Criminal 
 Law Amendment Act attempted to define limitations on a range of 
 male sexual behavior primarily with prostitutes and adolescent girls 
 on behalf of a middle-class familial norm. Named “An Act to make 
 
Legislating the Norm 191 
 
 further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the sup¬ 
 pression of brothels, and other purposes,” it was quickly passed in 
 the fall of 1885 after a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette by 
 William Stead catalyzed public opinion in its favor. Dramatically en¬ 
 titled “the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” and purporting to 
 describe the sale of a young working-class virgin into “white slavery,” 
 Stead’s (mostly apocryphal) story so enraged public sentiment that 
 over 250,000 people reportedly demonstrated in Hyde Park in support 
 of the legislation.” While the main purpose of the bill was to raise 
 the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen and to provide 
 police enforcement for the regulation of brothels, it also included in 
 the now infamous section ii the first legal classification of a sexual 
 relation (as opposed to a sexual act) between men: 
 
 Any male person who, in public or private, commits or is party 
 to the commission of, or procures the commission by any male 
 person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, 
 shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof 
 shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for 
 any term not exceeding two years with or without hard labour. 
 
 This legal injunction formally shifted the criteria for criminalizing 
 sexual practices between men: whereas “sodomy” had enjoined a 
 particular sexual act that was to some extent independent of the sex 
 of the actors, “acts of gross indecency” were entirely unspecified in 
 themselves and only derived their “indecency” from their appearance 
 in the context of a relationship between two men. In so contextualiz¬ 
 ing the new misdemeanor, the law moved beyond its earlier historical 
 concern with prosecuting a particular form of sexual transgression to 
 policing a range of activities that could at different moments be in¬ 
 terpreted as “indecent” if they involved two or more men. Hence, the 
 Criminal Law Amendment Act constituted all such relationships as 
 objects of legal scrutiny and thereby shifted the locus of culpability 
 from a particular kind of act to a particular type of actor. 
 
 This metonymic slide from act to actor can be seen to have sub¬ 
 sumed the moralistic (knowledge) effects emerging from earlier inter¬ 
 pretations of sodomy in defense of a normative familial ideology. In 
 arguing for the bill before the House of Commons, Sir R. Assheton- 
 
192 Ed Cohen 
 
 Cross, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, succinctly 
 stated the aim of the act: . the purity of the households of this 
 
 country shall be maintained and . . . those who wish to violate them 
 shall be punished.”” That the defense of “household purity” should 
 provide the legislative context for reconceptualizing the illegality of 
 a diverse set of sexual activities between men suggests that what was 
 being legislated was a standard for male sexual behavior rather than 
 a liminal form of sexual transgression. For, unlike sodomy, which 
 '^specified the illegality of a limited range of sexual activities (“bug¬ 
 gery with mankind or beast”) whose transgressive character derived 
 from a Judeo-Christian affirmation of monogamous procreative sexu¬ 
 ality, “acts of gross indecency” had no particular specificity save for 
 the sexual similarity of the sexual actors and were defined against 
 a normative standard which deified the “purity” of the middle-class 
 “household.” 
 
 In the years that followed the passage of section ii, the public re¬ 
 porting of prosecutions under the new legal rubric provided an oppor¬ 
 tunity to produce new representations of sexual relations between 
 men. To a large extent, such trials, by foregrounding sexual practices 
 that challenged normative gender ideologies, constitute what Victor 
 Turner has called “social dramas,” insofar as they bring into play cer¬ 
 tain contested elements of social behavior and through this conflict 
 allow individuals “to take sides in terms of deeply entrenched moral 
 imperatives and constraints, often against their own personal prefer¬ 
 ences.”” This definition seems particularly appropriate for those cases 
 tl^t so catalyzed public interest that they transformed news into 
 '^'scandal.” While it is impossible to rigorously specify what consti¬ 
 tutes a scandal, perhaps the best way to define one is in terms of the 
 reactions it evokes.” For clearly, a scandal differs from news per se 
 inasmuch as it provokes readers “to take sides” usually in a highly 
 emotional or affective manner. The volatility characterizing these 
 processes of social division and judgment in turn suggests that a scan¬ 
 dal’s “content” must in some sense include behavior which confounds 
 the very certainty of basic social distinctions and implies that there 
 are no clear (moral, ethical, legal) boundaries for human action. By 
 thematizing this sense of cultural indeterminacy, scandals open up 
 a liminal period during which the normative values and practices 
 
Legislating the Norm 193 
 
 of a culture are contested. Individuals and groups align themselves 
 according to their responses to the behaviors at issue, thereby recon¬ 
 stituting hegemonic configurations and ideologies in relation to the 
 previously undefined or transitional activities. Scandals would ap¬ 
 pear, then, to crystallize new configurations of social difference by 
 articulating heretofore marginal elements of a social formation in re¬ 
 lation to those normative standards against which positions may be 
 taken, judgments may be formed, and alliances may be created. 
 
 In one of the rare attempts to theorize this ubiquitous yet univer¬ 
 sally overlooked form of social transformation. Max Gluckman sug¬ 
 gests that scandals perform a unifying function within a culture by 
 “creating a past history for the members in relation to one another” 
 and by “competitively aligning [individuals and cliques] against each 
 other.” While Gluckman’s conclusion is based on analysis of precapi¬ 
 talist social formations, his suggestions seem adaptable to the context 
 of nineteenth-century Britain with one major distinction: unlike the 
 more contained cultures that both Turner and Gluckman consider, in 
 which individual members have (more or less) immediate access to 
 the actors in or at least the context of the “social drama,” the national 
 scandals occurring in Britain during the last half of the nineteenth 
 century were necessarily mediated by the press. Indeed, the numer¬ 
 ous sexual scandals played out in the press, at least from the 1870s on, 
 constitute a common staple of the “new journalism” ’s attention. The 
 widespread newspaper coverage of the arrest and trial of Ernest Boul¬ 
 ton and Fredrick Park for conspiracy to commit sodomite acts (1870), 
 the Besant-Bradlaugh trial for republishing pamphlets offering birth- 
 control instruction (1876), the ongoing coverage of the campaign to 
 repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, the scandal involving sex acts 
 between high male officials at Dublin Castle (1884), the trial and 
 acquittal of a notorious brothel keeper, Mrs. Jeffries (1884), and the 
 “Maiden Tribute” affair (1885), among others, testify to the role that 
 scandals play in consolidating popular understanding of a disparate 
 set of sexual practices. An analysis of the newspaper reporting on 
 each of these particular incidents would reveal much about the emer¬ 
 gence of popular discourses on sexuality in Victorian Britain; suffice 
 it to say here that, as an integral part of the emergence of mass jour¬ 
 nalism in the late nineteenth century, the coverage of sexual scan- 
 
194 Ed Cohen 
 
 dais was instrumental in articulating sexual behavior as an element 
 of class and national identities and in unifying class and national 
 identities in relation to normative appraisals of sexual behavior. 
 
 By way of concluding this narrative of (il) legalities, I’ll consider one 
 further trial, if only because it became (in 1889-1890) the first sensa¬ 
 tional prosecution under section ii of the Criminal Law Amendment 
 Act prior to Wilde’s own.^^ Dubbed “the Cleveland Street Affair” 
 after the small West End street where, at number 19, a male brothel 
 proffering young postal employees to an upper-class and often titled 
 male clientele became the center of a controversy that not only im¬ 
 plicated several highly placed men (including Prince Albert Victor, 
 second in line to the throne) in a web of—to use the public prosecu¬ 
 tor’s words—“unnatural lust,” but also put both the state prosecution 
 and the newspaper coverage themselves on trial. The circumstances 
 of “the affair” are rather complex: on 4 July 1889, while pursuing an 
 investigation of small theft from the Central Telegraph Office, the 
 police interrogated a fifteen-year-old messenger boy named Charles 
 Swinscow who appeared to have more money in his possession than 
 his meager salary could account for. Under questioning Swinscow 
 revealed that he had earned the money by going to bed with “gentle¬ 
 men” at the house in Cleveland Street run by a man called Charles 
 Hammond. He also volunteered that he knew of at least two other 
 telegraph boys who had pursued similar outside employment and 
 noted that they had all been introduced to the practice by another 
 messenger, Henry Newlove [!?]. These revelations led to an investi¬ 
 gation culminating in the prosecution of Newlove and an older man, 
 George Veck, for procuring boys to “commit divers acts of gross inde¬ 
 cency with another person.” The third man, Charles Hammond, was 
 also indicted but fled the country to avoid prosecution. 
 
 Although the indictments received cursory treatment by both the 
 Times and the Star, by and large the press had paid almost no atten¬ 
 tion to the case up until this point. However, when testimony given 
 in both the investigation and the trials suggested the involvement of 
 persons of rank and, in particular, that of Lord Arthur Somerset (who 
 upon learning of his implication in the case left for the continent), 
 journalistic interest was aroused. Fittingly, on ii September 1889, the 
 Pall Mall Gazette was the first to make the connection explicit: 
 
Legislating the Norm 195 
 
 We are glad to see that Sir Augustus Stephenson, Solicitor to 
 the treasury, was present at the Marlborough Street police court 
 yesterday, when two prisoners were committed for trial in con¬ 
 nection with a criminal charge of a very disgraceful nature. Mr. 
 Hannay refused bail for both the accused, and no doubt if found 
 guilty by a jury they will receive exemplary punishment. But the 
 question which Sir Augustus Stephenson will have to answer is 
 whether the two noble lords and other notable persons who were 
 accused by the witnesses of having been the principles in the 
 crime for which the man Veck was committed for trial are to be 
 allowed to escape scot free. There has been too much of that kind 
 of thing in the past. The wretched agents are run in and sent 
 to penal servitude: the lords and gentlemen who employ them 
 swagger at large and are even welcomed as valuable allies of the 
 Administration of the day. 
 
 This account sketches out the terms within which the case was re¬ 
 ported to the public. The specific criminal acts themselves were typi¬ 
 cally invoked euphemistically (“a criminal charge of a very disgrace¬ 
 ful kind”) if at all (“the crime for which the man . . .”), while the text 
 elaborates with much gusto the inequities of the penal system. Thus, 
 the sexual transgressions function here merely as a prelude to the 
 political charges, metonymically infecting the latter with the immo¬ 
 ralities generated by the former. When Veck and Newlove pled guilty 
 on i8 September and received sentences of nine and four months’ 
 imprisonment, respectively, the stage was set for the next act in the 
 scandal. 
 
 While the state attempted to determine the legal and political fea¬ 
 sibility of pursuing charges against Somerset and other named indi¬ 
 viduals, sectors of the press became impatient with what was deemed 
 the sluggishness of the proceedings. On i6 November 1889 a newly 
 founded Radical journal, the North London Press, published an arti¬ 
 cle under the banner “THE WEST END SCANDALS,” publicly nam¬ 
 ing Lord Arthur Somerset and the earl of Euston as being “among 
 the number of aristocrats who were mixed up in an indescribably 
 loathsome scandal in Cleveland Street.” The article then proceeded 
 to claim that both men had been allowed to leave the country and 
 
196 Ed Cohen 
 
 “thus defeat the ends of justice, because their prosecution would dis¬ 
 close the fact that a far more distinguished personage [Prince Albert 
 Victor] was inculpated in these disgusting crimes.” Here again, as in 
 the Tall Mall Gazette article quoted above, the nature of the sexual 
 crimes seems only of interest insofar as it underscores the inequities 
 of class privilege. The sexual practices are rendered as “indescribably 
 loathsome”—itself a highly evocative description—and “disgusting 
 crimes,” but they take on significance not primarily in themselves but 
 only as they become the opportunity for the “defeat of justice.” Un¬ 
 fortunately for the editor of the paper, Ernest Parke, justice had not 
 been quite so battered as he thought, and the earl of Euston whom he 
 had publicly described as having absconded to Peru to avoid prosecu¬ 
 tion was in fact still in the country and was not heavily implicated 
 in the case. Taking umbrage at the inclusion of his name along with 
 Somerset’s as an unfair defamation of his character, Euston quickly 
 brought charges against Parke for criminal libel. 
 
 Parke’s trial became the occasion for a flood of press coverage, since 
 it was the press itself that was now in the dock. The case juxtaposed 
 Euston’s claim that he had visited the house in Cleveland Street just 
 once in the spring of 1889—as his counsel said, “prompted it might 
 be by a prurient curiosity which did him no credit”—after having 
 been given a card advertising poses plastiques (the Victorian equiva¬ 
 lent of a strip joint) while walking in Piccadilly. Upon learning that 
 there were no poses plastiques but only young male prostitutes, the 
 earl claimed that he quickly left the house and never returned. The 
 defense for its part attempted to prove both that Euston had visited 
 Cleveland Street on several occasions and that he had willingly en¬ 
 tered into the specialties of the house. The proof of this latter charge 
 came in the testimony of a rather notorious male prostitute, John 
 Saul, who offered details of alleged sexual acts he had committed 
 with Euston.^® Since the defense focus was on proving the justification 
 for the statements about Euston published in the North London Press, 
 the accounts of the trial foregrounded the question of the credibility 
 of the testimony while rendering the particular claims made about 
 sexual activities in very obscure language. Thus, the Times could re¬ 
 port Saul’s account of the activities which took place between him 
 and Lord Euston only by describing them as unfit for publication. 
 
Legislating the Norm 197 
 
 When Parke was found guilty on 17 January 1890 and sentenced to a 
 year in prison, the press almost unanimously abjured from referring 
 to the substance of the sexual charges and instead editorialized about 
 the appropriateness of the libel conviction. 
 
 While the press coverage of the Cleveland Street affair provided the 
 first major coverage of prosecutions under the Criminal Law Amend¬ 
 ment Act for “committing acts of gross indecency,” it represented 
 these acts only to the extent that they constituted the necessary 
 backdrop for a libel case itself predicated on a challenge to unequal 
 execution of justice based on class. The sexual crimes, although very 
 explicitly placed at the margins of the reporting (and indeed often 
 represented only by their suggestive absences), provided indispens¬ 
 able atmospheric interest because they confirmed the “degeneracy” 
 of the aristocracy who were perceived as getting away with them, 
 while those less well off were punished.” Yet the peripheral nature of 
 this coverage does not mean that the sexual acts were not themselves 
 at issue, for clearly what was thematized in the subsequent references 
 to the incident was not the question of legal justice but the sexual 
 underpinnings of the case. When Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray 
 appeared shortly after Parke’s conviction in 1890, the Scots Observer 
 concludes its damning review with an unmistakable reference to the 
 Cleveland Street scandal: 
 
 Mr. Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better un¬ 
 written; and while “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” ... is in¬ 
 genious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly the work of 
 a man of letters, it is false art—for its interest is medico-legal; 
 it is false to human nature—for its hero is a devil; it is false to 
 morality—for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does 
 not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, 
 health, and sanity. The story—which deals with matters only 
 fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing 
 in camera —is discredible alike to author and editor. Mr. Wilde 
 has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but 
 outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he 
 takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his 
 own reputation and the public morals.* 
 
198 Ed Cohen 
 
 This prescient alignment of Wilde’s text (which during his trials 
 would become a metonym for his own “decadent” sexual practices) 
 with the events of the Cleveland Street scandal—five years before 
 his own trials would entirely eclipse this earlier incident as a cul¬ 
 tural marker of same-sex relations between men—indicates how the 
 press coverage of such proceedings was important as a means of 
 mediating the popular interpretation of the new legal category and 
 thereby structuring public representations of nominally “unrepre¬ 
 sentable” practices. To the extent that the press provided a context 
 both for the dissemination of information about sexual relations be¬ 
 tween men and for the organizing of that information into legiti¬ 
 mately “public” forms, it constituted an important nexus for the 
 construction of popular concepts of male sexuality. Even though the 
 press reports on the Cleveland Street scandal attempted to maintain 
 the same-sex practices of the actors at the margins of its coverage, 
 the marginalized practices still effectively structured the historical 
 interpretation of the legal events, making it possible for the author of 
 this review to impugn Wilde by association without any explicit ref¬ 
 erence to excluded acts. In the case of Oscar Wilde, no such pretense 
 of marginalization was possible, and thus the newspaper accounts of 
 his trials provided a critical site for articulating an emerging popular 
 conceptualization of male same-sex relations in terms of a new moral 
 and legal standard for sexual behavior. 
 
 Recent polemics within gay historiography (and 1 have already de¬ 
 clared my interest by calling it “gay”) have expended much intellec¬ 
 tual, if not emotional, energy on determining or denying the birth 
 date of “the homosexual.” Some argue that “homosexual” denotes 
 a set of sexual activities between men that have existed—transhis- 
 torically and cross-culturally—in a recognizably “modern” form for 
 as long as several hundred to perhaps well over a thousand years. 
 Others contend that “homosexual” acquired a unique specificity in 
 the nineteenth century that marks it as a socially and historically de¬ 
 terminant frame for comprehending and experiencing a set of sexual 
 practices between men such that they are distinguishable from earlier 
 ways of knowing/experiencing these “same” practices. While clearly 
 
Legislating the Norm 199 
 
 my approach is more closely aligned with the latter than the former, 
 it seems important to stress that the polemical divide is constructed 
 upon a political question represented in the guise of concrete his¬ 
 torical and semantic issues. For what appears to be at stake in the 
 historiographic debates about “homosexuality” is how we ought to 
 comprehend the limits of its effectiveness for organizing our own 
 engagement with and experience of the current historical moment. 
 
 The fluidity of and interpenetration between categories derived 
 from legal, moral, religious, and popular discourses foregrounds the 
 extent to which the public representations of “sodomy” situate 
 sexual activities between men as elements in shifting configurations 
 of power and domination. The criminalization of these sexual activi¬ 
 ties crystallizes different historical meanings at different historical 
 moments, and the prosecution of men for sodomy rearticulates these 
 meanings within the processes whereby power is exercised. For me, 
 such a descriptive paradigm seems far from “academic” in a nation 
 that is experiencing the public redefinition of sexuality in the wake 
 of AIDS and is simultaneously confronting the (knowledge) effects 
 of the recent Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. In this 
 conjuncture, as the legal interpretation of “sodomy” is being explic¬ 
 itly linked to public fears generated by the media representations of 
 AIDS, we find once again that the interpretations ascribed to sexual 
 activities between men are mediating new forms of medical, legal, 
 religious, political, and moral authority designed to delimit the range 
 of “legitimate” sexual practices. Yet the ability of gay men and les¬ 
 bians to resist such authority is predicated upon our refusing the 
 limitations of those categories that naturalize the power to name our 
 experience as “unnatural” and upon comprehending the historical 
 consequences that this power has in and for our everyday lives. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York, 1942), 63. 
 
 2 See H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1962). While 
 purporting to provide verbatim transcripts of the legal proceedings. Hyde’s text 
 is in fact a pastiche (drawn from contemporary news accounts) that structures 
 the events as an exemplary—if apologetic—tale of Wilde’s meteoric rise and pre- 
 
200 Ed Cohen 
 
 cipitous fall. In his long-awaited biography of Wilde (New York, 1988), Richard 
 Ellmann provides yet another rewriting of this chronology without altering the 
 now traditional narrative form. For a critique of Ellmann, see my “Nothing Wilde,” 
 The Nation, 13 February 1988, 203-6. 
 
 3 See Phylis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis (London, 1980) and The Woeful Victorian: A 
 Biography of John Addington Symonds (London, 1965); Jeffrey Weeks, “Havelock 
 Ellis and the Politics of Sex Reform,” in Socialism and the New Life, ed. Sheila Row- 
 botham and Jeffrey Weeks (London, 1977), 139-85; and Arthur Calder Marshall, 
 Lewd, Blasphemous and Obscene (London, 1972). 
 
 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 
 i: 43. 
 
 5 This legislative account is taken from H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Other Love 
 (London, 1970) which provides the most detailed contextualization of sodomy’s 
 criminalization. This historical process has been underanalyzed by gay historians; 
 note, for example, the absence of the bill’s consideration in Alan Bray’s Homo¬ 
 sexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), a text which reviews literature 
 back to the very period of the law’s passage. 
 
 6 While to date there is no work that comprehensively traces the history of this non¬ 
 nomination or its implications, John Boswell in his Christianity, Social Tolerance, 
 and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980) indirectly illustrates that by the thirteenth 
 century it had entered ecclesiastical discourse when he quotes a letter from Pope 
 Honorious 111 to the archbishop of Lund (380). 
 
 7 On “the flock,” see Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of 
 Political Reason,” in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterlin McMurrin (Salt 
 Lake City, 1981), 224-54; see also Boswell, Christianity . . . and Homosexuality, 
 who explores this nexus from the origins of Christianity through the Middle Ages. 
 
 8 Michael Goodich, “Sodomy in Medieval Secular Law,” Journal of Homosexuality 1 
 (Spring 1976): 297. 
 
 9 On “truth” as a “system of exclusion” that arranges particular historical configu¬ 
 rations of power/knowledge, see Michel Foucault’s “The Discourse on Language,” 
 in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 
 215-37. 
 
 10 Hyde, Trials of Oscar Wilde, 31. As Boswell notes: “. . . the word [sodomy] would 
 not necessarily imply homosexuality since by the early seventeenth century ’sod¬ 
 omy’ referred to ‘unnatural’ sex acts of any type and included certain relations be¬ 
 tween heterosexuals—anal intercourse for instance” {Christianity . . . and Homo¬ 
 sexuality, 98). 
 
 11 Sir James Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law of England (London, 1883), 2: 
 429. For an outline of the specific legal restrictions on papal authority generated 
 during Henry’s reign, see John Reeves, History of the English Law (Philadelphia, 
 
 1880), 4: 542-54- 
 
 12 For Hyde, Trials of Oscar Wilde, the choice does appear arbitrary: “No doubt bug¬ 
 gery appeared to Cromwell as suitable a subject as any other for the inauguration 
 
Legislating the Norm 201 
 
 of this process which was to continue and eventually lead to the practical aboli¬ 
 tion of all ecclesiastical courts a century later . . (39). However, given the range 
 
 of possible choices, it seems highly unlikely that "sodomy" should be randomly 
 singled out to initiate this strategy simply for lack of any better alternative. 
 
 13 See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political 
 Theology (Princeton, 1957). 
 
 14 This movement provides an excellent example for Foucault’s description of sover¬ 
 eign power as essentially “the right to take life or let live”: "Power in this instance 
 was essentially a right of seizure; of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; 
 it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it" (His¬ 
 tory of Sexuality, 136). See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: 
 Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane 
 (New York, 1972), 192-222. 
 
 15 Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 
 1797 )- 
 
 16 See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 38. 
 
 17 Coke, Laws of England, 58. 
 
 18 Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love (Berkeley, 1985), 53-54. 
 
 19 Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 19. 
 
 20 This characterization of public execution derives from Michel Foucault, Discipline 
 and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), 48-49. 
 
 21 Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 26. 
 
 22 Ibid., 19, 16. 
 
 23 Ibid., 37. Bray’s anachronistic use of “homosexuality" is based on his supposition 
 that it is "directly physical—and hence culturally neutral.” While this thesis is 
 clearly at odds with the project of my essay, his analysis of historical materials 
 still seems empirically if not theoretically sound. 
 
 24 My discussion of this case is based on an anonymous pamphlet published in Lon¬ 
 don in 1699 entitled The Tryal and Condemnation of Mervin Lord Audley, Earl 
 of Castle-Haven, at Westminster, April the 5 th 1631 . For abetting a rape upon his 
 Countess, committing sodomy with his servants, and commanding and countenanc¬ 
 ing the Debauching of His Daughter recently reprinted in Sodomy Trials, ed. Ran¬ 
 dolph Trumbach (New York, 1986). See also Caroline Bingham, “Seventeenth- 
 Century Attitudes Towards Deviant Sex,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History i 
 (Spring 1971): 447-68. 
 
 25 Dudley Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, 1957), loi; quoting 
 Swift, Bahlman notes that during the period the word "project” connoted an ori¬ 
 entation of the individual toward the public sphere for the improvement of civil 
 society. 
 
 26 John Lacy, A Moral Test (London, 1704), 13. 
 
 27 Bahlman, Moral Revolution, is the most comprehensive source on the Reformation 
 Societies. 
 
 28 Quoted in Bahlman, Moral Revolution, 38. 
 
202 Ed Cohen 
 
 29 Ibid., 33. 
 
 30 Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatim,” 245-50. 
 
 31 John Disney, An Essay upon the Execution of the Laws against Immorality and 
 Prophaneness (London, 1708), iv. Bahlman, Moral Revolution, succinctly summa¬ 
 rizes the position taken by many reformers: "at a higher level morality would be 
 a social cement, an instrument of civil peace" (42). 
 
 32 Using material largely culled from the Select Trials for Murders, Robberies, Rapes, 
 Sodomy, Frauds, and Other Offenses, at the Sessions House in the Old Bailey (Lon¬ 
 don, 1734-35), Bray argues that the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a 
 “new identity,” i.e., “the molly,” that crystallized a variety of cultural meanings 
 not applicable to earlier definitions of “sodomite” and “bugger”: “The identity 
 existed rather as a possible lifestyle that integrated homosexuality, to the extent 
 that it was adopted, into a broad range of other experiences and forms of behavior, 
 into the kind of person that you were; it had as palpable an existence over and 
 against the individual as the conventions and life of the molly houses themselves, 
 which it repeated on a personal scale” (99). While it seems quite probably that the 
 subculture which produced and was reproduced by/through the “molly houses” 
 significantly transformed the meanings attributed to sexual acts between men— 
 both by those who engaged in them and those who execrated them—Bray’s con¬ 
 clusions are unfortunately based on highly problematic textual interpretations. 
 Since he first ignores the cultural construction of the Select Trials as “popular 
 fictions”—although he admits in a footnote that this is what they are—and then 
 attempts to use them to produce a pseudo-phenomenology of what the “molly’s” 
 experience must have been like, his “fiction” interpolates a number of question¬ 
 able assumptions about how these individuals made their lives meaningful in the 
 context of a dominant culture that seemed to exclude them. Thus, for example, 
 Bray argues that the effect of raids on molly houses made the members of the sub¬ 
 culture more aware of their “identity”: “Someone who was a molly might well, 
 probably would, avoid arrest and the horrors that followed, but what he could 
 not avoid knowing was the constant possibility of this fate. And the implication of 
 that? He could not avoid knowing—he could not afford to avoid knowing—what 
 he was and what he was part of” (93). This subjectifying approach necessarily 
 leads Bray to conclude that the “molly” was an “identity” based in a “lifestyle” 
 and leads him to suggest that “the molly” was the prototype for—though not the 
 same as—“the homosexual.” Here the anachronistic usage of terminology derived 
 from contemporary gay culture illustrates the circularity of Bray’s project: in order 
 to demonstrate the creation of a cultural category not unlike one produced in the 
 past one hundred years, he uses the rhetoric of this category to describe an earlier 
 set of experiences and then concludes that they are structurally similar. Randolph 
 Trumbach, “London’s Sodomite: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in 
 the i8th Century," Journal of Social History ii (Fall 1977): 1-33. also uses the 
 Select Trials to develop an account of what the “molly’s” life was like, but he is 
 much less speculative about the subjective aspects of this experience. 
 
 Select Trials, 195. Samuel Stevens reported at the trial of William Griffin that 
 
 33 
 
Legislating the Norm 203 
 
 his accounts were accurate since "Every night when I came from thence, 1 took 
 memorandums of what I had observ’d, that I might not be mistaken in dates.” 
 
 34 Ibid., 193. 
 
 35 See Trumbach, ed.. Sodomy Trials, 17. 
 
 36 The most significant counterexample to this claim appears in the Select Trials syn¬ 
 opsis of Gilbert Lawrence’s trial for sodomy in August 1730. Here the text notes 
 the indictment as; “Gilbert Lawrence of the Precinct of St. Brides, was indicted for 
 that he not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved by a devilish 
 Instigation. . . .’’ The “Ordinary’s Account” indicated that while awaiting execu¬ 
 tion Lawrence refused to confess his crimes even though the narrator/confessor 
 told him; “it was to no purpose to deny the fact, since there was no hope of a 
 Repreive, and that he would glorifie God by a free Confession, which would also 
 make him leave this World with greater peace of Mind, in taking Shame and Con¬ 
 fusion of Face to himself, for so notorious, so heinous, so barbarous, so unnatural 
 a crime” (375). However, this extended religious diatribe can to some extent be 
 attributed to the indication that Lawrence was a French Catholic and therefore 
 his execution merited this religious charge, while those of “good Protestants” did 
 not. 
 
 37 Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (London, circa 1730). Although 
 open to methodological criticism. George Rousseau’s recent essay, “The Pursuit of 
 Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century,” in 'Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized 
 Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. R. P. Maccubbin (Cambridge, 1987), 132- 
 68, provides an incredibly rich bibliography of contemporary sources on eigh¬ 
 teenth-century sodomy. 
 
 38 The final chapter of Plain Reasons, entitled “The Perfection of Prudes, and the Bar¬ 
 barities of Women to one another,” provides an interesting coda to the arguments 
 against male effeminacy. Here the author argues that children born out of wed¬ 
 lock should be legitimated since, in his estimation, so long as sex is procreative it 
 is moral, while the immorality of sex lies in not providing for the children thus 
 engendered. This advocacy of male sexual access to women beyond the constraint 
 of (Christian?) marriage underscores the normative assumption upon which the 
 attack on sodomy depends; i.e., that “manliness” is tantamount to virility with/ 
 against women. 
 
 39 Alex K. Gigeroff, Sexual Deviations in the Criminal Law (Toronto. 1968). 13. 
 
 40 Sir Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law (New York, 1957), 3; 
 141-207. 
 
 41 Ibid., 202. This quotation occurs during Radzinowicz’s discussion of the attempts 
 to criminalize adultery. While he never explicitly refers to sodomy in this context, 
 it seems plausible to extrapolate the doctrine for this offense as well. 
 
 42 A. D. Harvey, “Prosecutions for Sodomy in England at the Beginning of the 
 Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 21 (1978); 939-48. Radzinowicz, English 
 Criminal Law, 72 and 330-31, also provides statistics concerning sodomy prosecu¬ 
 tions during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
 
 43 Harvey, “Prosecutions for Sodomy," 939. 
 
204 Ed Cohen 
 
 44 Ibid., 946: “As women became more and more confined to a narrow range of social 
 roles, and an exhaustive code of manly behavior and manly attitudes became more 
 established, so sexual ambivalence became more and more outlawed. . . .” 
 
 45 Clippings of these accounts along with Robert Holloway’s sensationalistic pam¬ 
 phlet, The Phoenix of Sodom or the Vere Street Coterie. Being an Exhibition of the 
 Gambols Practiced by the Ancient Leechers of Sodom and Gomorrah, embellished 
 and improved with Modern Refinements in Sodomitical Practices, by the Members 
 of the Vere Street Coterie, of detestable memory (London, 1813), are reprinted in 
 Trumbach, ed.. Sodomy Trials. 
 
 46 I have written on this consolidation at great length in my dissertation. Talk on 
 the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of the Discourse on Male Sexuality (Stanford, 
 1988). 
 
 47 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, n.s., vol. 19 (1828), 350-60. 
 
 48 Ibid., 354; emphasis mine. 
 
 49 The 1861 “Act to consolidate and amend the Statute Law of England and Ireland 
 relating to Offenses against the Person,” 24 & 25 Victoria, Cap. C, reiterates the 
 definition of the offense and the required proof as specified in the 1828 act, amend¬ 
 ing the latter only by changing the penalty from death to “penal servitude for life 
 or for any term not less than ten years.” In addition, however, the 1861 statute 
 defines a lesser crime: “the attempt to commit the said abominable crime” pun¬ 
 ishable by “penal servitude for any term not exceeding ten years and not less than 
 three years, or any terms not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.” 
 It is this last lesser offense that would seem to have provided the prototype for the 
 1885 criminalization of “acts of gross indecency.” also punishable by two years’ 
 imprisonment with or without hard labor. 
 
 50 The most comprehensive discussion of the act appears in Franqois Lafitte’s “Homo¬ 
 sexuality and the Law,” British Journal of Delinquency 9 (July 1958): 8-19. For 
 an account of the legislative history of sec. ii, see F. B. Smith, “Labouchere’s 
 Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill,” Historical Studies (University 
 of Melbourne) 17 (October 1976): 165-73. 
 
 51 Judith Walkowitz. Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980). remains 
 the best source on the Contagious Diseases Acts. 
 
 52 On the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” see Judith Walkowitz’s Jack the Rip¬ 
 per's London (Chicago, forthcoming); also see Deborah Gorham, “The ‘Maiden 
 Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of 
 Childhood in Late-Victorian England.” Victorian Studies 21 (Spring 1978): 353-79. 
 
 53 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, n.s., vol. 300 (1885), 578. 
 
 54 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society 
 (Ithaca. 1974), 35. 
 
 55 While almost no work has been done on this type of historical event, the one 
 recent text which does take up the subject is woefully inept at characterizing its 
 field of inquiry. Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman, in Scandal (New York. 1985), 
 provide a series of platitudes by way of definition: “A scandal is any event that 
 ‘lets the cat out of the bag’ and provides material for interesting gossip”: “it [scan- 
 
Legislating the Norm 205 
 
 dal] suggests that truth has finally triumphed and the hypocrite stands exposed”; 
 “scandal is based on wishful thinking. The public wants to be shocked in order to 
 confirm its own sense of virtue": “what interests us is the contrast between myth 
 and reality that becomes apparent when a scandal explodes.” What these char¬ 
 acterizations do suggest, however, is that scandal is constituted primarily by the 
 public responses that it provokes and, indeed, to some degree is these responses 
 themselves. The authors of this text would probably vociferously deny this sug¬ 
 gestion, however, since their project is designed specifically to provide a listing of 
 those “events” which provoke such response and does not address the responses 
 themselves at all. 
 
 56 Max Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4 (June 1963): 313. 
 
 57 Of all the late Victorian “scandals,” only the Cleveland Street affair has received 
 even the most cursory attention. My account is culled from two books, H. M. 
 Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal (New York, 1976), and Colin Simpson, Lewis 
 Chester, and David Leitch, The Cleveland Street Affair (Boston, 1976). The former, 
 which attempts to reconstruct the chronology of events, relies on newspaper ac¬ 
 counts, but as in Hyde’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde, fails to provide any analysis 
 of this coverage. The latter proceeds in much the same manner with a some¬ 
 what more detailed account of the behind-the-scenes machinations which led to 
 or didn’t lead to prosecutions. 
 
 58 Saul is also reputed to be the anonymous author of a choice piece of Victorian 
 pornography entitled The Sins of the City of the Plain published privately in 1882. 
 
 59 A poem published in the North London Press (and quoted in Simpson, Chester, 
 and Leitch, Cleveland Street Affair, 117-18) makes these connections explicit: 
 
 My Lord Gomorrah sat in his chair 
 Sipping his costly wine: 
 
 He was safe in France, that’s called the fair; 
 
 In a city some call ’Boo-line’ 
 
 He poked the blaze and he warmed his toes. 
 
 And, as the sparks from the logs arose. 
 
 He laid on finger beside his nose— 
 
 And my Lord Gomorrah smiled. 
 
 He thought of the wretched, vulgar tools 
 Of his paederastian joys. 
 
 How they lay in prison, poor scapegoat fools; 
 
 Raw, cash-corrupted boys. 
 
 While he and his ‘pals’ the ‘office’ got 
 
 From a ‘friend at Court,’ and were off like a shot. 
 
 Out of reach of Law, Justice, and ‘that—rot,’ 
 
 And my Lord Gomorrah smiled. 
 
 60 Quoted in Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality (New York, 1971), 75-76. 
 
'S«| , ' ‘ ’ ''-^ 
 
 
 m 
 
 , --.-k‘-.iri'.:»* 4 fV»|^‘.^Aft' 
 
 .){) IC . .>Wl«f^f»iA*i.J' '■< ' ^ 
 
 ' ■''^' •.>»'''bU«#.' '....► *“< 
 
 ^ ,,Wfr,>rMat -n,,. 
 
 :3 ^!WUt'kJV >’ '■■■' / . ^••.H^Vi*M <“'<* >^^''W^^^ t< ' .' ''ll 
 
 '' '.’ayi!. »<Ti ' ^^("•^A'M>*i. *',,'/ •.^./'■' ' ■ '^'ji^ii^.*' 
 
 •^.*.V;Wi^'8''.Ht^/ "r ,-V yir>‘^rhrV^i 
 
 -lA*. > 'r^ (til's ' ■■(• 
 
 ^ V' ■ *' 'i' -5 ’. .'il'»t>:rtFfV* 
 
 t.i swt iattfw,j'ir^,j.' A’ «-'■•■ f>^. 
 
 *i''Av.V'- i 
 
 " t»4i’’‘-< \'■ •'<;»?-••*■'''■'■'iy>': <'i :^ilii|_ 
 
 ' ■ V ^ Tfejg gjlMiCW ..' r '■«' • ivx- iJ * 'i 
 
 ' ‘ 1'1'j'ifllWBij^lk.''' . . . , 
 
 .= 'it ,1 i,'<?.,i?)ci;‘■ 
 
 ‘ '■ . rT, . .. *.. ..'f 
 
 
 :^.i 
 
 BL-Ju-.. ,.ii,J!iS*'-^. ^ .■?«.iS'!'k'^ 3 s •'■ «1 
 
 ■. i..£ .■tT,■' 'iiit^«-y”>>» ’"''' 
 
 ih a I *■« ^nsiiKii^T' 
 
 1 ii,iV 'S .-.t tl 4 <iV 
 
 V’J,.»'» ' ,Ifji f'■■■'■< 
 
 wii< M^wStd i‘-‘,Hli 
 
 f^'''i#|; ■'* ■■ '*’^1 
 
 (ytirniti, 
 
 ; ' :'4>;yllili.,,* JIIR< &• <r^*t 
 
 
 ' , M^yT WaiWri#}'^. 
 
 ■k'M • 
 
 
 ■>^> ,' 
 
 
William A. Cohen 
 
 Willie and Wilde: Reading 
 The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 
 
 When Oscar Wilde was brought to trial in 
 1895 for committing “acts of gross indecency,” 
 one of the most damaging pieces of evidence 
 against him was a letter of his to Lord Alfred 
 Douglas. In the letter, Wilde thanked Lord 
 Alfred for sending him a poem and com¬ 
 plimented his young friend in extravagant 
 terms: 
 
 My Own Boy, 
 
 Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a 
 marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours 
 should have been made no less for music 
 of song than for madness of kisses. Your 
 slim gilt soul walks between passion and 
 poetry. 1 know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo 
 loved so madly, was you in Greek days. 
 
 The letter had been stolen, used in an at¬ 
 tempt to blackmail Wilde, and finally became 
 damning evidence. Poised at the center of the 
 scandalous trials that brought Wilde’s down¬ 
 fall was this purloined letter about a medio¬ 
 cre sonnet. From Reading prison, Wilde re¬ 
 counted the episode two years later in another 
 
208 William A. Cohen 
 
 letter to Lord Alfred: 
 
 You send me a very nice poem, of the undergraduate school of 
 verse, for my approval: I reply by a letter of fantastic literary 
 conceits. . .. The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare’s 
 sonnets, transposed to a minor key.' 
 
 In contrast to its object, claims Wilde, the letter of commentary 
 upon the sonnet is itself “like” a sonnet of Shakespeare’s, diminished 
 though it may be. Here is a prison letter (itself eventually published 
 under the title De Profundis) about an evidential letter that is more 
 poetic than the poem to which it replies—a pederast’s letter about 
 a poetaster’s sonnet, and all to the tune of Shakespeare: this is how 
 Wilde interprets his own tragedy. 
 
 Wilde clearly understood just how self-damaging his own lovely 
 words had been, as he continues in De Profundis: 
 
 It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if 
 wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either 
 University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain 
 that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly 
 its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes 
 from you into the hands of a loathsome companion: from him 
 to a gang of blackmailers: . . . every construction but the right 
 one is put on it: Society is thrilled with the absurd rumours that 
 I have had to pay a huge sum of money for having written an 
 infamous letter to you: this forms the basis of your father’s worst 
 attack: I produce the original letter myself in Court to show what 
 it really is: it is denounced by your father’s Counsel as a revolting 
 and insidious attempt to corrupt Innocence: ultimately it forms 
 part of a criminal charge: the Crown takes it up: the Judge sums 
 up on it with little learning and much morality: I go to prison for 
 it at last. That is the result of writing you a charming letter.^ 
 
 Wilde’s condensed self-history is quoted here at length because it 
 describes precisely the trajectory of an intercepted letter, of the real 
 horrors that result when something akin to “a passage from one of 
 Shakespeare’s sonnets” is misinterpreted and mishandled. 
 
 Despite its pretention, the comparison to Shakespeare is neither 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 209 
 
 casual nor unjustified: not only was Wilde well acquainted with the 
 sonnets, but, in a certain interpretation, the sonnets themselves can 
 be read as letters sent to the poet’s “own boy” in praise of his “red 
 rose-leaf lips . . . made no less for music of song than for madness 
 of kisses.” Like the letter that is both commentary upon a poem and 
 itself poetic, Wilde’s novella The Portrait of Mr. W. H., written six 
 years before the trials, analyzes Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence even 
 as it articulates its theory in a story that is, in its way, Shakespearean 
 (though again transposed to a minor key). Wilde’s narrative folds 
 back upon its purported object, rendering its interpretation of the 
 sonnets upon the framing story. Like the “real” sonnet/letter sequence 
 that came to recapitulate it, Wilde’s novella displays the inextrica- 
 bility of literature from interpretation. 
 
 At the center of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. is a theory that ostensibly 
 attempts what many others have sought as well: to suggest a positive 
 identity for the young man to whom at least the first 126 sonnets 
 (in the canonical arrangement) are addressed.’ In Wilde’s story, the 
 case is argued that the young man is the same as the “W. H.” of the 
 printer’s famous epigraph: 
 
 TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF. 
 
 THESE. INSVING. SONNETS. 
 mL w. h. all. HAPPINESSE. 
 
 AND. THAT. ETERNITIE. 
 
 PROMISED. 
 
 BY. 
 
 OVR. EVER-LIVING. POET. 
 
 WISHETH. 
 
 THE. WELL-WISHING. 
 
 ADVENTVRER. IN. 
 
 SETTING. 
 
 FORTH. 
 
 T. T. 
 
 Based on an imputed narrative of the poems, Wilde claims that Mr. 
 W. H. was a lovely “boy-actor” in Shakespeare’s company to whom 
 
210 William A. Cohen 
 
 the poet was deeply devoted. Moreover, “working purely by inter¬ 
 nal evidence,” Wilde’s story discovers the actual name of this boy 
 embedded in the sonnets. The name—Willie Hughes—is located in 
 several famous puns in the sonnets where various senses of “Will” 
 and “Hews” are brought into play. 
 
 The narrator begins the story by recounting his acquaintance with 
 an older friend, Erskine. The latter, in turn, relates the story of 
 his own youthful friendship with another beautiful boy-actor, Cyril 
 Graham. This gifted boy originally developed the interpretation of 
 the sonnets, claiming to solve the “riddle” of the famous young man’s 
 identity. Unable to persuade Erskine with his theory, Graham pro¬ 
 duces as incontrovertible evidence a painting of “Mr. W. H.,” clearly 
 identified as the young man of the sonnets. Although initially con¬ 
 vinced, Erskine soon discovers the portrait to be a forgery, and upon 
 this revelation, Graham shoots himself, charging Erskine in a note 
 with proving the truth of the theory to the world. While Erskine 
 still remains unconvinced, the narrator is enticed by the theory, and 
 pursues the evidence to develop an even stronger case for Graham’s 
 interpretation. Presenting the evidence to Erskine several weeks later, 
 the narrator manages at last to convince the older man of the theory, 
 only to find that, in doing so, he himself has lost his faith in it. Two 
 years later, he receives a note from Erskine in which the latter claims 
 he is about to kill himself out of devotion to the theory. The narra¬ 
 tor rushes to his friend, only to learn that he is already dead—not, 
 however, by his own hand, but instead from consumption, which he 
 knew would kill him when he sent the false suicide note. 
 
 Returning to the theory proper, the most urgent question facing 
 us is: what might it mean for an analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets to 
 focus on proper names encrypted within the poetic structure? It is, 
 first of all, a project encouraged by the sonnets themselves: “Every 
 word doth almost tell my name, / Showing their birth, and where 
 they did proceed.” Such an interpretation understands its object to 
 be a puzzle, a surface on which coded information is inscribed; the 
 information is clearly visible to the knowing reader, yet hidden from 
 the untrained eye. The story’s narrator enunciates just this method 
 of reading as he gazes on the portrait of Willie Hughes for the first 
 time: “I see there is some writing there, but I cannot make it out.”^ If 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 2li 
 
 the disguised referent of the sonnets is itself a proper name, then the 
 poems are cast in a register different from their typical reading either 
 as universalizable love poems or as biographical clues to the life of 
 Shakespeare. For despite its initial claims, Wilde’s project is exactly 
 not to track down historical evidence about Shakespeare, but instead 
 to produce a reading that is “literary” in the fullest sense. 
 
 In the realm of proper names, language induces the belief that 
 the subjectivity of “1” and “you” (that is, where “1” designates the 
 speaking subject) has been transcended; meaning appears anchored 
 to identity when “Will” can speak his own name (as in Sonnets 135 
 and 136). Names implicitly propose the inextricability of signifier 
 from signified because the one invokes the other even when they are 
 temporally and spatially dislocated: a unique human identity and its 
 concomitant proper name would seem to be mutually constitutive. 
 But the difference between common words and proper names is a 
 trick of language, a false representation. Naming is only the most 
 basic instinct of language, for in the proper name the primal fantasy 
 of language is replayed: a singular correspondence between word and 
 thing is established. Such an arrangement suggests that a name is a 
 false word, or, what amounts to the same thing, a word that is truer 
 than the truth. Naming displays the fundamental desire of language: 
 yet even as the primordial act of naming enables Wilde’s story (in 
 constituting the sonnet theory), the simultaneous hollowing out and 
 overdetermination of names is what will ultimately structure it.^ 
 
 In The Portrait of Mr. W. H., the issue is further complicated by the 
 fact that the name is encoded in specifically graphemic form: here 
 the name is a written unit, abbreviated—as a name can be only when 
 written—by its initial letters. Initials figure importantly in this text 
 not only in what they stand for but also in the way in which they 
 stand for something: initials are the truncated, synecdochical form of 
 the material signification of a proper name. As it seeks to decode the 
 initials, Wilde’s theory of the sonnets becomes a determinedly visual 
 one, in the sense that it proceeds by reading—or more precisely, look¬ 
 ing at—the printed words on the page: “In the original edition of 
 the Sonnets ‘Hews’ is printed with a capital letter and in italics,” as 
 is Will. The poems come to be more than just a hidden code: they 
 are a picture of a puzzle, which must be interpreted as visual repre- 
 
212 William A. Cohen 
 
 sentation. Furthermore, if, as I’ve claimed, naming is the instance of 
 language that wants to be truer than the truth, then the visual image 
 of such a structure is located exactly where the story begins: with 
 a discussion of artistic forgery. “I insisted,” says the narrator in the 
 story’s second sentence, that “forgeries were merely the result of an 
 artistic desire for perfect representation.”^ 
 
 The story is arranged around a forgery that operates in just such a 
 structure: the portrait in the title is the “perfect representation” not 
 of some referential reality but of the name figured in the sonnets; it is 
 a palpably visual form of the name “Mr. W. H.” Yet the portrait that 
 is intended as final proof of the theory’s verity (“I warmly congratu¬ 
 lated him on the marvellous discovery”) ultimately asserts only its 
 fraudulence (“the theory is based on a delusion. The only evidence 
 for the existence of Willie Hughes is that picture in front of you, and 
 the picture is a forgery”). And like the name that is coded and hid¬ 
 den in the poems, the forgery—ocular proof of the theory—must be 
 extracted from its unlikely location: 
 
 [Cyril] told me that he had discovered [the picture] by the 
 merest chance nailed to the side of an old chest that he had 
 bought at a farmhouse in Warwickshire. ... In the centre of the 
 front panel the initials W. H. were undoubtedly carved. It was 
 this monogram that had attracted his attention, and he told me 
 that it was not till he had had the chest in his possession for sev¬ 
 eral days that he had thought of making any careful examination 
 of the inside. One morning, however, he saw that one of the sides 
 of the chest was much thicker than the other, and looking more 
 closely, he discovered that a framed panel picture was clamped 
 against it. . . . It was very dirty, and covered with mould; but he 
 managed to clean it, and, to his great joy, saw that he had fallen 
 by mere chance on the one thing for which he had been looking. 
 Here was an authentic portrait of Mr. W. H., with his hand rest¬ 
 ing on the dedicatory page of the Sonnets, and on the frame itself 
 could be faintly seen the name of the young man written in black 
 uncial letters on a faded gold ground, “Master Will. Hews.”^ 
 
 Just as Cyril is led from the initials of the printer’s inscription to 
 discover the name in the sonnets, so it is the initials that “attract 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 213 
 
 his attention” to the chest in which he supposedly discovers the por¬ 
 trait. Cyril is a consistent reader: he moves from obscuring exteriors 
 to revealing initials and finally to discovering written names (“on 
 the frame itself could be faintly seen the name of the young man 
 written”). 
 
 The forgery is then a visual representation not only of the subject 
 of the sonnets, but of the cryptographic hermeneutic that the theory 
 proposes. Yet if the forgery represents the theory in visual form, it 
 is only as a forgery—precisely not as a representation of the “real” 
 —that it induces belief in the theory. For the forgery is, in Wilde’s 
 larger aesthetic project, a form of art higher than vulgar imitation of 
 reality. In “The Decay of Lying,” for instance, he writes of the liar: 
 
 Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from 
 the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss 
 his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of 
 the great secret of all her manifestations. 
 
 Similarly, in “The Truth of Masks,” Wilde claims: 
 
 Of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare’s plays does not, in 
 the slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth, 
 and Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selecting 
 them at pleasure.® 
 
 The forgery is as “true” as the name it represents, not only in lending 
 it aesthetic form, but also in recapitulating the structure of the name: 
 that form of language truer than the truth. The forgery is more self¬ 
 consciously artificial—and therefore, in Wilde’s scheme, truer to the 
 ideals of art—than any “genuine” portrait. Cyril obviously knows as 
 much, as Erskine notes: 
 
 This was Cyril Graham’s theory, evolved as you see purely from 
 the Sonnets themselves, and depending for its acceptance not so 
 much on demonstrable proof or formal evidence, but on a kind 
 of spiritual and artistic sense, by which alone he claimed could 
 the true meaning of the poems be discerned.’ 
 
 The portrait represents the truth of the theory, regardless of its 
 own status as forged. It is simply a tool for overcoming skepticism. 
 
214 William A. Cohen 
 
 as Cyril explains to Erskine: “1 did it purely for your sake. You would 
 not be convinced in any other way. It does not affect the truth 
 of the theory.”'® Cyril regularly develops his theory by literalizing 
 images from the sonnets: the character Willie Hughes bodies forth 
 Shakespeare’s puns, just as the portrait itself is already figured across 
 the sonnets. For the young man in Shakespeare’s poems is described 
 throughout in terms of painting: 
 
 Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d 
 Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart. 
 
 My love’s picture . . . the painted banquet. 
 
 1 never saw that you did painting need, 
 
 And therefore to your fair no painting set. 
 
 Cyril’s coffered forgery simply dramatizes in fiction Shakespeare’s re¬ 
 peated image of his friend as an “up-locked treasure” in a “chest”: 
 “Thee have 1 not lock’d up in any chest / Save where thou art not.” 
 
 As we move from the theory out into the narrative frame, we can 
 begin to see how the graphic value of names is inscribed all over the 
 story, and, following Wilde’s logic, apply to the object of interpreta¬ 
 tion its own hermeneutic model. 
 
 His very name fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How 
 musically it sounded! Yes; who else but he could have been the 
 master-mistress of Shakespeare’s passion . . . ?" 
 
 As the (significantly unnamed) narrator makes this gleeful exclama¬ 
 tion, he entices us to attend to the names Wilde chooses for his own 
 characters, if only to find “hidden” there the very strategies with 
 which to decode them. 
 
 At the center of the story is Cyril Graham, instigator of the Willie 
 Hughes theory and a near reproduction of Willie himself. Both young 
 men are “of quite extraordinary personal beauty, though evidently 
 somewhat effeminate”: like Shakespeare’s presumed catamite, Cyril 
 is “very languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good 
 looks. ... He was always dressing up and reciting Shakespeare.”'^ 
 Also like Willie, Cyril’s name is overdetermined: but not only does 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 215 
 
 it signify multivalently, it also signifies multivalence itself—doing so 
 precisely in the register of the written letter. Cyril conjures up Saint 
 Cyril, originator of the eponymous alphabet, which, for the Victo¬ 
 rian reader, is an unintelligible form of writing; appropriately, the 
 coded alphabet’s namesake is the character capable of deciphering 
 the alphabetically reduced inscription. Bearing in mind the hagio- 
 graphic allusion, we can rearrange the letters “c y r i 1” to produce 
 “lyric,” which in its anagrammatic form comes to stand for the son¬ 
 net folded in on itself; encrypted in the decrypter’s name is the object 
 of interpretation. 
 
 To supplement the suggestion of foreign alphabetics and topsy¬ 
 turvy poetry inherent in Cyril’s first name is his surname, Graham— 
 which we might rewrite as “gram,” the supplement itself. The Oxford 
 English Dictionary defines a -gram as “something written, letter (of 
 the alphabet),” that is, the smallest, most atomized unit of scripted 
 language. The -gram, of course, is not a meaningful word by itself, 
 but only a suffix, a subatomic linguistic unit that signifies the atomic 
 unit of material signification: it gains value only when attached to 
 other words (diagram, anagram). If the name of the father—Cyril’s 
 father, that is—stands for the minimal written unit, then the name 
 of the mother—or more accurately, the mother’s father, Crediton 
 (Cyril’s guardian)—suggests the entrance of this minute but signifi¬ 
 cant unit into the circuit of signification: only on the course of this 
 circuit does the “gram” accrue meaning. For what is “credit” but 
 the arbitrary, linguistic assignment of value to an absent referent? In 
 Lacanian terms, the name “Cyril (Crediton) Graham” suggests that 
 the law of the father (the literal name of the father) becomes mean¬ 
 ingful upon (and is coincident with) the subject’s entrance into the 
 symbolic register, the circuit (the “credit”) of signification.'^ In this 
 all-too-literal reading of a name, we locate the order of written lan¬ 
 guage (of grammatology), and it is from this figure of language in 
 language that the story produces its literal, literary reading of the 
 sonnets. 
 
 “Cyril Graham” bears forth the operations of written language, and 
 is thus the necessary originator of the Willie Hughes theory: a “Cyril 
 Graham” reading is one that attends to the sonnets’ literal significa¬ 
 tion, one that can produce the name of the object of desire out of 
 th* printed matter of the poems. We might at this point recall the 
 
216 William A. Cohen 
 
 earlier formulation of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. as both literary inter¬ 
 pretation and literature. If in the first sense the story proceeds ac¬ 
 cording to a determinable hermeneutic practice (to which I’ve given 
 the name “Cyril Graham”), then in the second it enacts and per¬ 
 forms this practice in the narrated story that constitutes its frame. 
 The overdetermined name is the juncture of this putative difference 
 between interpretation and narration: just as within Cyril’s theory, 
 where the hidden name “Willie Hughes” is manifested in a character, 
 so in Wilde’s story is a “Cyril Graham” reading—bound up as it is in 
 the decoding of written text—amplified and announced in (written 
 all over, as it were) the thematization of writing itself. 
 
 Wilde’s story is suffused with letters, signatures, and literature. It 
 begins and ends in a library, as if to figure the story itself between 
 the covers of a book, and from the opening—“when the question of 
 literary forgeries happened to turn up in conversation”—the written 
 word is at issue. In the portrait there is “crabbed sixteenth-century 
 handwriting” that can be detected only with a magnifying glass, and 
 writing on its frame that is visible only once it is cleaned; there are 
 two suicide notes as well as Cyril’s initial invitation to Erskine to 
 learn of the theory—though the latter “was rather surprised at his 
 taking the trouble to write.”'’’ Writing in the novella comes to seem 
 like the displaced performance of the interpretive model I’ve identi¬ 
 fied, as if the story were compelled to keep secret its own method of 
 deciphering secrets exactly by broadcasting that method everywhere 
 in the image of writing. 
 
 The sonnet theory is committed to writing each time it is re¬ 
 invented, until it takes on the tangible form of a letter—though a 
 letter that is by definition unrecoverable: 
 
 1 have not any copy of my letter, I regret to say, nor have I been 
 able to lay my hand upon the original; but I remember that I 
 went over the whole ground, and covered sheets of paper with 
 passionate reiteration of the arguments and proofs that my study 
 had suggested to me. ... I put into the letter all my faith. 
 
 To put the theory into a letter is not simply to transcribe it; more than 
 its literal epistolary location, the Willie Hughes theory has the ma¬ 
 terial qualities of a letter, in that only one person at a time can pos¬ 
 sess (that is, believe) it. It can be passed from one person to another. 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 217 
 
 but it cannot be shared or divided. Yet as Wilde would painfully dis¬ 
 cover, letters are hardly inviolable: they are subject to stealing and 
 misinterpretation, and can lead to criminal prosecution. 
 
 The theory’s circuit through the story illustrates its indissoluble 
 unity as epistolary object. In the first exchange, when Erskine begins 
 to convince the narrator, he states, “As I don’t believe in the theory, 
 
 I am not likely to convert you to it.” In the exchange that takes place 
 twenty years earlier, when Erskine is the recent convert, he exclaims 
 upon discovering Cyril’s forgery, “You never even believed in [the 
 theory] yourself. If you had, you would not have committed a forgery 
 to prove it.” In the third exchange—as the narrator returns the theory 
 to Erskine toward the end of the story—the narrator confesses: 
 
 No sooner, in fact, had I sent [the letter] off than a curious re¬ 
 action came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my 
 capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, 
 that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that 1 was 
 perfectly indifferent to the whole subject.'® 
 
 The theory’s determining characteristic is this: to convince someone 
 else is not to believe in it oneself. The repetition of this topos suggests 
 that belief in the theory is material, exchangeable, and indivisible: 
 its representational form is precisely a letter. Belief “goes out of one” 
 only to lodge itself (for the moment) in the recipient. Like Lacan’s 
 formulation for the purloined letter of Poe’s story, the theory passes 
 through and locates the subject, but continues ever on its trajectory. 
 
 The story’s most overt letters, however—the suicide notes—curi¬ 
 ously subvert its pervasive insistence on writing. Cyril kills himself 
 after the forgery is discovered, leaving behind a note for Erskine that 
 claims “he was going to offer his life as a sacrifice to the secret of the 
 Sonnets.” The suicide note is a form of absolute writing: it is unidirec¬ 
 tional, unanswerable. Yet the note is peculiarly ineffective, for in this 
 story a man’s suicide is precisely what testifies to the insincerity of 
 his belief: Erskine responds to the death by saying that “a thing is not 
 necessarily true because a man dies for it,”'^ and after Erskine’s death 
 the narrator comments, “no man dies for what he knows to be true. 
 Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their 
 hearts tells them is not true.”'® 
 
 Yet Cyril’s suicide fails in a more important way, too, as the per- 
 
218 William A. Cohen 
 
 formance of his death covers over the very name that he had hoped 
 to sustain by killing himself: “he shot himself with a revolver. Some 
 of the blood splashed upon the frame of the picture, just where the 
 name [Willie Hughes] had been painted.”'^ Cyril offers his life to the 
 theory of the sonnets, but his blood literally obliterates the name 
 he uncovered. The story’s ubiquitous images of writing dramatize in 
 “literature” the procedures of “interpretation,” yet the interpreter’s 
 ultimate act of writing—his suicide note—would seem to traduce his 
 interpretation by figuratively covering with blood the name it has 
 worked to decipher. 
 
 If Cyril’s interpretive methods finally undo themselves, how are 
 we to account for Erskine’s suicide note, at once a rehearsal and 
 inversion of Cyril’s? For Erskine’s letter is a forgery: as the doctor 
 reveals to the narrator, Erskine had known for months that he was 
 to die of consumption. To answer this question, we need to know 
 how an “Erskine” interpretation of the sonnets would read and how 
 such an interpretation might be enunciated in its own register in 
 the framing narrative: only then can we understand how his suicide 
 stands in relation to the interpretive model that requires it. But to 
 identify Erskine’s hermeneutic strategy—distinct from Cyril’s, and 
 linked in certain ways to Wilde’s own—we must return to the matter 
 of naming. 
 
 When he comes to narrate the theory, Erskine occupies the position 
 of sonneteer, adorer of his “very fascinating, and very foolish, and 
 very heartless” friend;^® he might thereby stand in for the poets. Will 
 and Oscar, themselves admirers of lovely boy-actors. By name he is 
 “kin” of the “Ers,” defined as follows in the Oxford English Dictionary: 
 
 In i8th c., Erse was used in literary England as the ordinary 
 designation of the Gaelic of Scotland, and occasionally extended 
 to the Irish Gaelic; at present [1893] some writers apply it to the 
 Irish alone. Now nearly obsolete. 
 
 If “Erse” was nearly obsolete by 1893, its homophone, “arse,” was 
 obsolete only in “polite use,” according to the OED. And who, more 
 than Wilde, we might ask, is kin of the Erse and of the arse? Erse: 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 219 
 
 “The issue that the Wilde legend has obscured,” one critic writes, “is 
 that until the mid-nineties, literary culture had linked Wilde’s sexu¬ 
 ality to his Celtic ethnicity rather than to his homoeroticism.”Arse: 
 “those red rose-leaf lips of yours”—once again Wilde’s self-declared 
 Shakespearean poetry, now comprehensible (as it probably was to 
 the prosecution) as coded sodomitical language.” 
 
 The peculiar conjunction of Irish and homosexual discourses pro¬ 
 duces a certain poetics to which The Portrait of Mr. W. H. gives the 
 name “Erskine.” It is worth noting in this context that Mr. W. H. 
 is the work that announces the arrival of Wilde’s homosexuality for 
 several critics.” And if Wilde progressed, in the popular imagination, 
 from a tolerated Irish nationalist” to a scandalous homosexual, then 
 “Erskine” is also the name for what he represented to the English pub¬ 
 lic. By the same logic that produced the “Cyril Graham” hermeneutic 
 as the decoding of scripted names, we might then expect to discover 
 in “Erskine” a reading attuned to the operations of homoerotic desire 
 through the written word. (The names for these interpretive strate¬ 
 gies are kept between quotation marks as an indication that, although 
 the story supplies the terms, it does not rigidly assign these herme¬ 
 neutics to the characters per se: each strategy is rather suggested 
 and represented by a character, but not necessarily articulated exclu¬ 
 sively by him.) While the story endorses both interpretive projects, it 
 would appear to privilege the latter, both in allowing it to frame the 
 former (within the narrative) and in its evocative consonance with 
 Wilde’s own concerns. 
 
 The affinity between Wilde and “Erskine” becomes clearer if we 
 turn for a moment to another of his letters, this one to Edmond de 
 Goncourt, dated 17 December 1891. The context is Wilde’s Erench 
 having previously been misunderstood—though he is quick to admit 
 “sans doute c’etait de ma faute”: 
 
 On peut adorer une langue sans bien la parler, comme on peut 
 aimer une femme sans la connaitre. Erangais de sympathie, je 
 suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamne a parler le 
 langage de Shakespeare.” 
 
 It is, appropriately, only in a foreign tongue that Wilde can name the 
 language he is condemned to speak: not English, bien sur, but “the 
 
220 William A. Cohen 
 
 language of Shakespeare.” He adores French without speaking it too 
 well, just as he could love a woman without knowing her: this French 
 “heterosexual” discourse (which he would go on to use in Salome) is 
 reserved for objects that are admired from afar, never really loved by 
 “knowing.”“ The language of Shakespeare, which he claims the En¬ 
 glish forced upon the Irish, takes on the value of Wilde’s homoerotic 
 discourse: it is the language of men, for men, between men. When an 
 Irishman is forced to speak in this Shakespearean tongue—a language 
 different from the one that he adores like a woman—it surely has the 
 sound of “Erskine’s” voice.^^ 
 
 The homoerotic valence that Wilde attributed to Shakespeare’s 
 poetry becomes even more vivid if we recall for a moment his self- 
 proclaimed Shakespearean letter to Lord Alfred, and the trials that 
 exposed it. Wilde and his counsel repeatedly defended his obviously 
 amatory letter by claiming that it was “literature”—not a mere 
 love letter—and thereby exempt from the usual (i.e., bourgeois, 
 “Philistine”) norms of moral judgment. To this effect, Edward Clarke, 
 Wilde’s counsel, stated in his opening speech at the first trial: 
 
 The words of that letter, gentlemen, may appear extravagant 
 to those in the habit of writing commercial correspondence, or 
 those ordinary letters which the necessities of life force upon one 
 every day; but Mr. Wilde is a poet, and the letter is considered by 
 him as a prose sonnet, and one of which he is in no way ashamed 
 and is prepared to produce anywhere as an expression of true 
 poetic feeling, and with no relation whatever to the hateful and 
 repulsive suggestions put to it in the plea in this case.^® 
 
 Despite the prosecution’s insistence that the letter made “repulsive 
 suggestions,” Wilde maintained, “I think it is a beautiful letter. It 
 is a poem. I was not writing an ordinary letter. You might as well 
 cross-examine me as to whether King Lear or a sonnet of Shakespeare 
 was .proper.” Yet Wilde’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets was 
 hardly deemed proper by the English public, for when the prosecutor 
 inquired, with reference to Mr. W. H., “I believe you have written 
 an article to show that Shakespeare’s sonnets were suggestive of un¬ 
 natural vice,” Wilde responded, “On the contrary I have written an 
 article to show that they are not. I objected to such a perversion 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 221 
 
 being put upon Shakespeare.” Where the court detected unnatural 
 vice, Wilde instead argued for the “great affection of an elder for a 
 younger man,” an affection that he identified in a well-established 
 literary tradition. It was through this tradition that he equated his 
 own erotic language with that of Shakespeare’s, as he made clear in 
 the following impassioned speech from the second trial (which was 
 met by “loud applause, mingled with some hisses”): 
 
 “The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such 
 a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was be¬ 
 tween David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of 
 his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelan¬ 
 gelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is 
 as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of 
 art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two 
 letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunder¬ 
 stood . . . and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It 
 is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is 
 nothing unnatural about it.^’ 
 
 The discussion of sonnets by Michelangelo and Shakespeare refers to 
 the enlarged version of The Portrait of Mr. W. H., in which Wilde 
 included a dissertation on the history of poetry with themes of 
 “platonic friendship.” Wilde’s consistent association of himself with 
 Shakespeare centers precisely on their shared erotic themes:’°yet The 
 Portrait of Mr. W. H. extends the parallels between the two play¬ 
 wrights’ poetry to include the very capacity of language to express or 
 contain the erotic. 
 
 The trials hinged upon conflicting interpretations of Wilde’s letters: 
 while the prosecution argued that the letters were erotic (that is, 
 criminally homoerotic), Wilde insisted on the purely aesthetic value 
 of their language. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. similarly vacillates be¬ 
 tween two interpretive strategies, for while the “Cyril Graham” proj¬ 
 ect is to decode names encrypted in the text, the “Erskine” method 
 seems inversely to inscribe into the text secrets—which are never¬ 
 theless open—with particular homoerotic content.^' As in many of 
 Wilde’s other works, the “secrets” are, paradoxically, entirely absent 
 at the same moment they are everywhere present. The examples that 
 
222 William A. Cohen 
 
 immediately come to mind are Dorian Gray’s mysterious vices, Alger¬ 
 non’s unseen friend Bunbury, and, epigrammatically, “The Sphinx 
 without a Secret.” As usual with Wilde, however, the best paradigm 
 is in his life: at the opening of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1895, he 
 put out word that members of the audience were to don green car¬ 
 nations, knowing they would think it “must be some secret symbol,” 
 and asserting that it meant “nothing whatsoever, but that is just 
 what nobody will guess.” An absent secret, certainly, but one with a 
 particular referent: unknown to most of the audience, the green car¬ 
 nation was a symbol coded for homosexuality in Paris—and therein 
 the logic of the open secret, inscribed everywhere upon the audience 
 and yet apparent to no one. As Cecil Graham, a character in the same 
 play, observes, “nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.”” 
 
 In The Portrait of Mr. W. H., the open secret (to the extent that it 
 is a secret) has similar characteristics, as, for instance, indignantly 
 described by biographer Rupert Croft-Cooke: 
 
 [The story] would have passed ... if it had been put forward as a 
 serious and rather boring literary theory, but to make a delight¬ 
 ful spree of Shakespeare’s homosexuality was unforgivable in the 
 1880s. It might fool the editor of Blackwood’s who saw in it noth¬ 
 ing but quaint antiquarian theorising, but it could not fool more 
 knowing readers, who considered that Wilde was suggesting En¬ 
 gland’s greatest poet was a bugger, and doing so by introducing 
 as narrator “one of the pretty undergraduates who used to act 
 girls’ parts.”” 
 
 But beyond the rather heavy-handed homoerotic imagery associated 
 with cross-dressing in Shakespeare, there are in the story certain in¬ 
 ternal dynamics as well as interpretive practices that come to be 
 homosexually charged—in much the same way that coded writing 
 was both thematized and developed as hermeneutic practice around 
 “Cyril Graham.” Just as Cyril leads us to decode names, that is, 
 Erskine will lead us to decode desire in the text. As Cyril extracts 
 the hidden painting from a chest in order to verify his theory, Erskine 
 seeks “to unlock the secret of Shakespeare’s heart,” to provide “the 
 only perfect key to Shakespeare’s Sonnets that has ever been made.”” 
 
 At one level, erotic desire in this text is quite explicit: Shake- 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 223 
 
 speare’s sonnets are called “strangely passionate poems”; Willie is 
 likewise evoked in “passionate” language: “so well had Shakespeare 
 drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his 
 dreamy deep-sunken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white 
 lily hands.” Erskine’s initial gesture toward the narrator indicates a 
 more-than-avuncular affection: “Erskine, who was a good deal older 
 than 1 was, and had been listening to me with the amused deference 
 of a man of forty, suddenly put his hand upon my shoulder.” And 
 Erskine depicts his earlier and deeper attachment to Cyril in striking 
 terms: 
 
 1 was a year or two older than he was, but we were immense 
 friends, and did all our work and all our play together. There 
 was, of course, a good deal more play than work, but 1 cannot 
 say that 1 am sorry for that. ... 1 was absurdly devoted to him. 
 ... He certainly was wonderfully handsome. ... 1 think he was 
 the most splendid creature 1 ever saw.^* 
 
 Cyril clearly knows as much about himself: “he always set an ab¬ 
 surdly high value on personal appearance, and once read a paper 
 before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good- 
 looking than to be good.” 
 
 The sonnet theory is always constituted between these erotically 
 charged pairs of men. The originary couple, Willie and Shakespeare, 
 comes to be replaced by Erskine and Cyril; the latters’ relationship is 
 reproduced by the narrator and Erskine, though now Erskine is the 
 disbelieving purveyor of the theory rather than its credulous recipi¬ 
 ent; in the final configuration, Erskine and the narrator switch roles, 
 and Erskine once more accepts the theory. If, as I’ve argued, belief in 
 the theory has the qualities of material text, then it is not only about 
 desire (since the content of the theory is the name of the object of 
 desire), but it takes on the asymptotic language of desire itself: “It 
 seemed to me that 1 was always on the brink of absolute verification, 
 but that I could never really attain to it.”” Again, like Lacan’s version 
 of the purloined letter, belief in the theory constitutes the subjec¬ 
 tivity of the one who possesses it. Yet when we augment this analogy 
 with the specific erotics of the story, we find that—precisely unlike 
 the oedipal triangle in which psychoanalysis situates production of 
 
224 William A. Cohen 
 
 the subject—^Wilde’s text (as well as Shakespeare’s, read in this way) 
 posits subjectivity only in a homoerotic duality. The oedipal myth 
 appears to be supplanted by some version of projected narcissistic 
 desire. 
 
 In this “Erskine” reading, it is homoerotic desire that is written 
 all over the text: such desire is, predictably, the content of its “open 
 secret.” Yet homoerotic desire also provides the very hermeneutic 
 model for exposing open secrets, as it has traditionally in our culture 
 —from “in the closet” to “coming out,” from coded manners and 
 apparel to (Lord Alfred’s best line) “the love that dare not speak 
 its name.”^® Homosexuality provides the literary content and, at the 
 same time, the hermeneutic practice for explicating that content, 
 just as the topos “deciphered writing” was both the content and the 
 strategy of the “Cyril Graham” reading. 
 
 1 have suggested that the “Erskine” interpretation corresponds to 
 an extent with Wilde’s own, if only for the fact of a name. Proceed¬ 
 ing by the same logic, we might expect evidence of this alliance to 
 locate itself with a kind of seriousness in Wilde’s “signature effect,” 
 as carefully attended to as the sounding of “Will” in the works of the 
 bard.^’ Wilde invokes his own name three times in the story: first at 
 a moment of uneasiness about gender, again at a point of imminent 
 revelation, and finally at a moment suggesting both the one and the 
 other. In the first instance, Cyril Graham is, “of course, wild to go on 
 the stage”—that is, to transform himself into a woman, as he does so 
 well: “Cyril Graham was the only perfect Rosalind 1 have ever seen.” 
 The second occurs at the moment Cyril presents his theory: “He told 
 me that he had at last discovered the true secret of Shakespeare’s Son¬ 
 nets . . . had found out who Mr. W. H. really was. He was perfectly 
 wild with delight.” The last occasion returns us to the unanswered 
 question of how to interpret Erskine’s false suicide. In the story’s pen¬ 
 ultimate scene, when the narrator learns of the “horribly grotesque 
 tragedy” that Erskine has died, he admits: 
 
 1 said all kinds of wild things, and the people in the hall looked 
 curiously at me. 
 
 Suddenly Lady Erskine, in deep mourning, passed across the 
 vestibule.^” 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 225 
 
 The narrator still believes Erskine to have committed suicide when 
 the latter’s mother materializes. Here, around the representation of 
 the only woman in the story, a kind of hysterical (“wild”) self¬ 
 reference arises. As if to perform the anxiety surrounding that most 
 glaring absence from the Willie Hughes theory of the sonnets—the 
 dark lady—Lady Erskine appears in funereal black, a figurative dark 
 lady, seeming to necessitate the sounding of Oscar’s own name.^' If 
 it is objected that Wilde’s self-reference is altogether too marginal 
 to be of much significance, it need only be pointed out that this is 
 precisely the complaint often sounded by Shakespeareans faced with 
 the Willie Hughes theory (at least when it is based on “internal evi¬ 
 dence” and not, as it was for Lord Alfred, on historical data): “Why 
 not ‘Will Rose’?” some critics have replied, since Rose is capitalized 
 and italicized in the sonnets as much as Hews. Obviously this misses 
 the point, since what makes Wilde’s theory compelling is that it can 
 be obscenely literal (in deciphering the name) at the same time that 
 it is thoroughly literary in describing and rehearsing the texture of 
 the poems. That Wilde’s theory operates at the level of the letter 
 should encourage, not dissuade us from reading likewise. 
 
 The “Cyril Graham” reading of this scene would easily make 
 reference to Shakespeare’s play on words in Sonnet 132 about the 
 dark lady in mo[u]rning. As with the depiction of Willie Hughes, it 
 would understand the story to enact dramatically a pun that is purely 
 graphic in the sonnets: the difference between “mourning” and 
 “morning” is only a written letter, visually (not aurally) discern¬ 
 ible. Its narrative representation takes the form of the figure across 
 whose body the Shakespearean pun is executed. The “Erskine” read¬ 
 ing, on the other hand, might discover an analogy between the un¬ 
 desirability of Shakespeare’s dark lady—the paradoxically unattrac¬ 
 tive object of desire—and the unattainable dark mother as object of 
 the dead son’s desire. Here we seem to have returned to the (inevita¬ 
 ble) oedipal mythology, hard as this story may have tried to swerve 
 from it. In the first reading, the mourning mother acts out the lan¬ 
 guage of Shakespeare’s dark lady in an all-too-obvious way (implying 
 that the visually determined “decoding” is another of this text’s open 
 secrets); in the second, she likewise manifests that all-too-obvious 
 object—“mother”—who is the ultimate horizon for erotic desire in 
 
226 William A. Cohen 
 
 any version of psychoanalysis. Ukc Cyril’s suicide, which upends 
 his theory by spilling blood on the very name it disclosed, Erskine’s 
 death seems to disrupt (by exposing) the entire “Erskine” project of 
 locating homoerotic desire in the text: his death can produce noth¬ 
 ing but a dark lady as mother, that profoundly unattainable (and, to 
 consciousness, undesirable) object of desire. 
 
 To reinforce this reading, 1 want to turn for a moment to the porno¬ 
 graphic novel Teleny (1890), often attributed in part to Wilde, which 
 has some close affinities with The Portrait of Mr. W. H. The narrative 
 structure is strikingly similar: Des Grieux, the central character, tells 
 his story (like Erskine) to an unnamed narrator, relating his youthful 
 relationship with a brilliant, beautiful young artist, Teleny, who (like 
 Cyril) kills himself after a “secret” is revealed. Given the essential 
 explicitness of pornography, a reading of Mr. W. H. “through” Teleny 
 produces a curiously explicit version of many elements of the present 
 interpretation. The two men are much more nearly doubles (“1 stared 
 at myself within the looking-glass, and 1 saw Teleny in it instead of 
 myself. ... 1 could not feel him at all; in fact, it seemed to me as if 
 1 were touching my own body”), their relationship is overtly sexual 
 (to say the least), and the parallel between the narrator and the artist 
 (Teleny) is clearly articulated (“1 think 1 can see him leaning . . . 
 as you are leaning now, for you have many of his feline, graceful 
 ways”), where the similarity between the narrator and Cyril Graham 
 is only implied in Mr. W. H. The close association between the “key” 
 to Shakespeare’s art and homosexuality in Mr. W. H. is carried over 
 to Teleny in the form of a clear correspondence between the sexual 
 and the artistic: Teleny’s brilliant piano playing is always contingent 
 upon the erotic link with Des Grieux. Yet if the “secret” of Mr. W. H. 
 is its homoerotic component, then Teleny, as a pornographic text, is 
 implicated in a pervasively secretive readership, however explicit its 
 content may be."*^ 
 
 What is particularly revealing about Mr. W. H. in terms of Teleny is 
 the force of the mother. In Teleny Des Grieux’s mother is finally what 
 comes between the men, as she and Teleny carry on an affair behind 
 Des Grieux’s back. The mother is an expressly, irrepressibly erotic 
 force, yet her sudden insinuation within the homosexual affair ulti¬ 
 mately performs the same function as the startling appearance of the 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 227 
 
 “dark lady” in The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: she suggests the closing 
 in of an oedipally driven heterosexuality, even if “perverted” in this 
 pornographic form. Des Grieux’s mother performs and reveals (in the 
 typically, excessively explicit manner of pornography) the function 
 of Erskine’s mother in Mr. W. H. That the “dark lady” in Mr. W. H. 
 is so marginal as to be almost unnoticeable is thus in one sense testa¬ 
 ment to her very significance; given the weight of the opposing terms 
 “trivial” and “important” in Wilde’s aesthetic lexicon, moreover, a 
 “woman of no importance,” one suspects, will never be entirely triv¬ 
 ial. However strenuously this text tries to establish a relation of de¬ 
 sire outside of and against restrictive heterosexual-oedipal models 
 from the “straight” world (and to whatever extent it is successful), 
 it finally lets in, if only for a moment, that classic figure of oedipal 
 desire. 
 
 Yet if the procedure of this reading has been throughout to display 
 the mutual and simultaneous effects of “literature” on “interpreta¬ 
 tion” and vice versa, then Wilde’s entire project—what can now be 
 understood as “reading by inversion”—will in one sense have already 
 exposed its homoerotic predilection. For it is well known that both 
 the language and the trope of “inversion” were common figures for 
 homosexuality in the second half of the nineteenth centuryand 
 for a story that is centrally concerned with the interrelation of litera¬ 
 ture and interpretation, such a trope overarches the text even as it 
 can never be articulated. 
 
 Returning to a place near where I started, 1 want to examine one 
 more letter of Wilde’s. In this one, from July 1889, to Robert Ross, 
 Wilde discloses the origin of The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: 
 
 Indeed the story is half yours, and but for you would not have 
 been written. . . . Now that Willie Hughes has been revealed to 
 the world, we must have another secret.^''' 
 
 It is apparently true that Ross gave Wilde the idea for the story, and 
 rather fitting that it was both a “secret” and a collaborative project 
 between the older poet and the pretty young man (Ross reportedly 
 claimed to have been “the first boy that Oscar ever had”)."*^ After 
 
228 William A. Cohen 
 
 the story was published in Blackwood’s magazine in July 1889, Wilde 
 continued to work on it, completing (but not publishing) the much 
 expanded version in 1893. The manuscript, stolen from Wilde’s flat 
 shortly after he was arrested, disappeared and remained unpublished 
 until 1921, when a pirated edition appeared in the United States; it 
 was not published in an authorized edition until 1958, by Wilde’s son 
 Vyvyan Holland. 
 
 In the longer version, Wilde made numerous additions to the mid¬ 
 dle chapters, where the narrator develops the sonnet theory, though 
 most of the added material has little bearing on the theory itself. It 
 elaborates and deepens the invented biography of Shakespeare, intro¬ 
 duces a catalog of boy-actors through history, and adds an essay 
 on platonic “friendship” and homoerotic poetry (of Michelangelo, 
 Montaigne, and others). The effect of the later version is to alter 
 the balance between framing narrative and sonnet theory greatly 
 in favor of the latter. The only significant deletion in the 1893 edi¬ 
 tion is the highly compressed and suggestive image of Cyril’s blood 
 spilling onto the name etched in the portrait’s frame. Between 1889 
 and 1893 Wilde’s erotic preferences seem to have altered significantly 
 as well, and 1 would therefore suggest that the first version—with 
 its bloodied writing—is more nearly allied with what I’ve called 
 the “Cyril Graham” reading, while the second—as a clearly identi¬ 
 fied treatise on homosexual poetry—is strongly weighted toward the 
 “Erskine” interpretation. That the Willie Hughes theory came to be 
 identified with homosexuality for both Wilde and his readers suggests 
 his motivation for expanding just that component of the story, even 
 at the expense of the thematics of graphic writing. The resulting im¬ 
 balance produces a noticeably weaker, more diffuse narrative, though 
 a correspondingly richer literary history. 
 
 Beyond the immediate circumstances of its production, moreover, 
 we can now understand that the “real history” of Wilde’s theory 
 curiously reproduces the story’s own internal “inverted” dynamic, 
 suggesting the infinite regress (mise en abime) of such a project. 
 Probably the most hackneyed question of literary identity in English, 
 the matter of the characters in the sonnets and of the dedication 
 has received innumerable hypotheses. The Willie Hughes theory was 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 229 
 
 first put forward in 1766 by Thomas Tyrwhitt, and Wilde’s work is 
 in one sense unabashed plagiarism. Samuel Butler published a simi¬ 
 lar theory in 1899, without acknowledging Wilde, and Lord Alfred 
 joined the fray with the ostentatiously titled True History of Shake¬ 
 speare’s Sonnets in 1933 (though he “utterly rejects the notion that 
 Shakespeare was a homosexualist”).''* Unlike Wilde, these and most 
 other critics engage the theory as if it referred to a historical and bio¬ 
 graphical reality—though ultimately Lord Alfred had some success in 
 this respect. If “the one flaw in the theory is that it presupposes the 
 existence of the person whose existence is the subject of dispute,” 
 then Douglas may well have overcome it. Incredibly, after his book 
 was published, Douglas learned from records in Canterbury of the 
 existence of a William Hewes connected with Marlowe’s company, 
 exactly as the theory had predicted."*^ 
 
 The issue, of course, is not whether Lord Alfred had the final, 
 incontrovertible proof of Willie Hughes’s existence: at least that is 
 never the interest of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. In Wilde’s terms. Lord 
 Alfred’s discovery only demonstrates the ascendancy of art over life; 
 in fact it illustrates quite nicely the claim Wilde makes in “The Decay 
 of Lying”: 
 
 All that 1 desire to point out is the general principle that Life 
 imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that 
 if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life 
 holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange 
 type imagined by a painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what 
 has been dreamed in fiction.''® 
 
 There is no indication that the volumes of discussion over identity in 
 the sonnets will ever abate: yet Wilde alone seems to have engaged 
 the question at just the literary register in which it is articulated. 
 The Portrait of Mr. W. H. soundly repudiates the insistent referen- 
 tiality of virtually every other Shakespearean scholar, for the story is 
 inextricably self-involved in the same way that it is involved in the 
 sonnets: its discovery of graphic writing and homoerotic desire as the 
 sonnets’ own issues are written, if always in “inverted” form, all over 
 the story. 
 
230 William A. Cohen 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1979), 107, 169. 
 
 2 Ibid., 169-70. 
 
 3 Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H., in Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Isobel 
 Murray (London, 1979). This edition, which I rely on for the most part, reprints 
 the story as it was published in 1889. When citing the expanded version of 1893, 
 The Portrait of Mr. W. H., ed. Vyvyan Holland (London, 1958), I include Holland’s 
 name. 
 
 4 Ibid., 140. 
 
 5 This discussion is indebted to Joel Lineman, "The Significance of Literature: The 
 Importance of Being Earnest," October 15 (Winter 1980): 79-90, and Shakespeare’s 
 Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, 1986), 
 28-29. 
 
 6 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 148, 139. 
 
 7 Ibid., 150, 166, 149-50. 
 
 8 Oscar Wilde, Intentions (New York, 1930), 29, 246. 
 
 9 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 147. 
 
 10 Ibid., 151. 
 
 11 Ibid., 159. 
 
 12 Ibid., 140, 142. 
 
 13 Cyril’s etymology is fruitful as well, for the name derives from the Greek Kurillos, 
 "probably from kurios, master, lord,” according to the American Heritage Dictio¬ 
 nary. And its Indo-European root, *ku-ro-, means “swollen, strong, powerful.” 
 What more vivid image of the phallic name of the father could we produce than 
 that of a “master” who is "swollen”? Furthermore, both his effeminacy/herma¬ 
 phroditism (“of course Cyril was always cast for the girls’ parts”) and the fact that 
 his parents are dead (“they had been drowned in a horrible yachting accident off 
 the Isle of Wight”)—thus putting him in the care of Lord Crediton—suggest his 
 immanent vacillation between “Graham” and “Crediton”: he is the boy who plays 
 the perfect girl, the man who bears his father’s name in his mother’s house, the 
 figure of a written unit engaged in the circuit of signification. 
 
 14 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 139, 141, 150, 143. 
 
 15 Ibid., 164. 
 
 16 Ibid., 141, 151, 165. 
 
 17 Ibid., 152. 
 
 18 Holland, ed.. Portrait of Mr. W. H., 89. Wilde had expressed the same sentiment 
 in a more personal vein in a letter to Harry Marillier from 1886: “I myself would 
 sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a 
 new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe 
 in than for what I hold to be true.” Cited in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New 
 York, 1988), 270, 297. 
 
 19 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 151-52. 
 
 20 Ibid., 140. 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 231 
 
 21 Sandra Siegel, "Anecdotes, Scandal, and Dorian Gray's Doubles" (unpublished, 
 Cornell University/Payne Whitney Psychoanalytic Institute, 1986), 12. Siegel ar¬ 
 gues that Wilde’s attachment to Celtic culture and his involvement in the radical 
 wing of the women’s movement (especially as editor of Woman’s World) com¬ 
 bined with a peculiar force in him that significantly threatened bourgeois English 
 culture. 
 
 22 1 am grateful to Christopher Craft for pointing out the allusion. If we pursued the 
 homoerotic puns, we would eventually locate Willie Hughes—concatenating the 
 famous Elizabethan play on “will" as both sexual desire and sexual organs, “use” 
 as sexual intercourse—and finally the poet himself: for the image of “shake spear" 
 is one of phallic thrusting. 
 
 23 Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1972), writes 
 that Wilde’s “comparatively discreet manner of existence during the years follow¬ 
 ing his marriage [in 1884] was disturbed by a number of factors in 1889 and 1890, 
 including [his] wilful and deliberate rashness in publishing a short story of homo¬ 
 sexual interest called The Portrait of Mr. W. H. in Blackwood’s Magazine” (iii). 
 Introducing the story, Isobel Murray writes: “At a time when homosexuality was 
 considered one of the vilest human aberrations, severely punishable by law, to 
 suggest that Shakespeare wrote his Sonnets to a boy actor whose personality domi¬ 
 nated him was courting disaster. William Blackwood was either brave or a little 
 out of touch when he wrote to Wilde accepting [the story]" (13). Likewise, in his 
 introduction to The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington and Stanley Wein- 
 traub (New York, 1981), Richard Aldington cites allusions to a work of Virgil’s in 
 Mr. W. H.: “an exquisitely beautiful poem but flagrantly homosexual. To anyone 
 who had read Virgil—and at that time most upper-class Englishmen had— The 
 Portrait of Mr. W. H. was an unequivocal declaration and an insolent defiance. 
 Prudent men began to drop Mr. Wilde’s acquaintance” (23). 
 
 24 See, for instance, the Scots Observer review in Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and 
 Morality (London, 1912), 90-94, which compares Dorian Gray to a fine perfor¬ 
 mance of an offensive song—namely, “God Save Ireland.” 
 
 25 Hart-Davis, ed.. Selected Letters, 100. 
 
 26 Roland Barthes strikes a similar note in Roland Barthes (Paris, 1975) when he 
 describes French, his “mother tongue,” as the “language of women”: “Tout ce 
 blocage [of other languages] est I’envers d’un amour: celui de la langue maternelle 
 (la langue des femmes). Ce n’est pas un amour national . . . [je] ne croi[s] a la 
 precellence d’aucune langue et [j’]eprouve souvent les manques cruels de fran^ais” 
 
 (119)- 
 
 27 In addition to the confusion between Wilde’s Celtic ethnicity and his deviant 
 sexuality, the latter was conflated with class issues as well, as in the vitriolic 
 review in the Scots Observer of Dorian Gray from 5 July 1890, which concludes: 
 “Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style: but if he can write for none but out¬ 
 lawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or 
 some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals” 
 (Mason, Art and Morality, 76). Wilde is accused of “descending” to infernal re- 
 
232 William A. Cohen 
 
 gions of both sex and class; the advice to seek “some decent trade” is an obvious 
 class jab. 
 
 28 H. Montgomery Hyde, The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1956), 112-13. 
 
 29 Ibid., 133, 130, 236. 
 
 30 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, relates the following anecdote, of a more personal associa¬ 
 tion: “Wilde once explained, at Lady Archibald Campbell’s, why he thought he 
 looked like Shakespeare. He ended a brilliant monologue by saying he intended 
 to have a bronze medallion struck of his own profile and Shakespeare’s. ‘And 
 I suppose, Mr. Wilde,’ said Lady Archibald, ‘your profile will protrude beyond 
 Shakespeare’s’ ” (289). 
 
 31 My discussion of the “open secret” derives in part from D. A. Miller, “Secret 
 Subjects, Open Secrets,” Dickens Studies Annual 14 (1985): 17-38. Miller describes 
 it as “the double bind of a secrecy which must always be rigorously maintained in 
 the face of a secret that everybody already knows, since this is the very condition 
 that entitles me to my subjectivity in the first place” (19). 
 
 32 Reginia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public 
 (Stanford, 1986), 163-65. 
 
 33 The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (London. 1948), 391. 
 
 34 Croft-Cooke, Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde, 111-12. 
 
 35 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 152. It is worth noting that the convergence of homo¬ 
 erotic themes, death, doubling, and narcissism on a “Will” is curiously anticipated 
 in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson” (1839). In Poe’s gothic tale, the 
 doppelganger drives the narrator to a murder/suicide in which the homoerotic and 
 the homicidal are completely identified. 
 
 36 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 144, 159, 139, 141-42. 
 
 37 Ibid., 163. 
 
 38 In “The Epistemology of the Closet (I),” Raritan 7 (Spring 1988): 39-69, Eve 
 Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies this historically strong link between the secrecy/ex¬ 
 posure topos in general and the homosexual secret in particular. “A whole cluster 
 of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century 
 Western culture are . . . quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity 
 of homosocial/homosexual definition, notably but not exclusively male, from 
 around the turn of the century. Among those sites are . . . the pairings secrecy/dis¬ 
 closure and private/public . . . condensed in the figures of’the closet’ and ‘coming 
 out’ ” (43-44)- 
 
 39 For a discussion of Oscar’s self-conscious use of “wild,” see Karl Beckson, “The 
 Autobiographical Signature in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Victorian Newsletter 
 69 (Spring 1986): 30-32. Beckson’s insights resonate, in a literal way, with the 
 Punch review (12 July 1890) that describes Dorian Gray as “Oscar Wilde’s Wildest 
 and Oscarest work” (cited in Mason, Art and Morality, 159). 
 
 40 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 143-44, 168. 
 
 41 In the later version of the story, Wilde accounts for the dark lady sonnets by 
 insisting that the sequence be reordered so that the young man sonnets contain. 
 
Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H. 233 
 
 and are not superseded by them. The narrator proposes that Shakespeare initially 
 feigns love for the dark lady only in order to draw her away from Willie Hughes, 
 but “suddenly he finds that what his tongue had spoken his soul had listened to,” 
 and he is helplessly in love with her, despite her ugliness. Eventually he recovers, 
 she departs, and the poet and the actor are reunited (Holland, ed.. Portrait of 
 Mr. W. H., 63-64, 60-73). 
 
 42 Oscar Wilde and Others, Teleny, ed. John McRae (London, 1986), 46, iio, 159. 
 On the supposed “secret society" of men who wrote and read the manuscript by 
 circulating it through a London bookshop, see McRae’s introduction. 
 
 43 See, for instance, Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, vol. 2 of Studies in the Psychol¬ 
 ogy of Sex (Philadelphia, 1920). For a rather graphic account of Wilde’s pathology, 
 see “The Problem of Wilde’s Inversion,” Appendix E in Hyde, Three Trials. Sedg¬ 
 wick argues that “inversion” continues as strong as ever in the cultural imagina¬ 
 tion of gay life (“Epistemology of the Closet,” 58). 
 
 44 Hart-Davis, ed.. Selected Letters. 78. 
 
 45 Hyde, Three Trials, 371. 
 
 46 Lord Alfred Douglas, The True History of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London, 1933), 
 19 - 
 
 47 Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W. H., 166, 160. See Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 
 43-44. William Freeman, The Life of Lord Alfred Douglas (London, 1948), substan¬ 
 tiates the claim with the report of one Mrs. M. A. Idiens; “Douglas said that he 
 had discovered and proved to be a fact that Mr. W. H. was William Hughes, the 
 handsome boy who for years acted the part of Shakespeare’s heroines. Douglas 
 had traced the family of the boy to Canterbury, where he lived with his parents 
 and where Douglas obtained full particulars. He had not published his discoveries 
 because his publisher had 'packed up’ and he did not feel sufficiently energetic to 
 obtain another” (282). 
 
 48 Wilde. Intentions. 39. 
 

 
 
 i ■ I, ,.j\Tj)i}Ji. 4 » 1 ■.♦' '••' '"^1, W '(f 
 
 ' ’ ’ ' ' ., 'VHJIW/Vltl'/,'' (\ «tt">W?.»fiei', 
 
 ’([''. y'lv.;,u v’'»* . iti>»t;<i»<-\SV...i|f •}’*'*Ul'li(4i^<-«?t<«.u 
 
 tSTI" j . . . 'PC* • ‘ ■-.l' ■ ' ‘ * -Ji 
 
 L-ti >■ ■ k' <..'j / >i. .irV-i 
 
 ' r■ • AV'M'^f'ff!' '•f ivJMXSijf?' 
 
 '^*<lliHM^*> ■vut».'-W> >>’ ^ 
 
 yv o.',.- ,,.^f 
 
 '•■ i'i 
 
 i;’,>h,<' :i ^4 
 
 il JtiiU 
 
 ,» * »>*»*' kAWfiiij 
 
 ' ' ' ‘^1'I ■'•■“^ -i" V/, <•»(» 
 
 ■''*!'« t'Mf'vl 
 
 ..■^A 
 
 
 ■f/S 
 
 *■ t^v I'lfs* 
 S f 
 
 Tn-r * 
 
 J'i. titm - 
 
 121 
 
 5 - 
 
 ,, '?■• >.’V"'^i 
 
 > ^ ’ ■ \' ’Tl 
 
 * - ■ ', !■ VVl' 
 ■, ,/| •\- ' /)'. 
 
 ' .•ti-.-' ^ 
 
 
 \t < 
 
 r • ' V‘'<' '■'(■ 
 
 . , r ■■'•.\\.’r.i,i 
 • t ''jf‘\> ■ '• • 'J,** ■'W" 
 < .;• ^ 'A*!' 
 
 
 '•* V' 
 
 :Mi 
 
 i I 
 
 •l? •■• 
 
 %v.:.j'v' 
 
 
Michael Moon 
 
 Disseminating Whitman 
 
 Between the novel and America there are 
 peculiar and intimate connections.” These 
 Sam Wellerish words are Leslie Fiedler’s open¬ 
 ing gambit in his i960 study Love and Death in 
 the American Novel.' 1 propose to supplement 
 (dangerously, 1 would hope) Fiedler’s thesis 
 by insisting on a third term—the homoerotic 
 —which is submerged in his neatly symmet¬ 
 rical linking of those two eighteenth-century 
 bourgeois creations, the novel and the United 
 States. In view of a large body of work 
 done in the past decade on gender historiog¬ 
 raphy, one might revise the opening words 
 of Fiedler’s book to read, “Between Ameri¬ 
 can literature and homoeroticism there have 
 historically been peculiar and intimate con¬ 
 nections.” In rewriting the sentence in this 
 fashion, one may be doing nothing more than 
 spelling out what was already at least implicit 
 in it as Fiedler originally wrote it, for his 
 use of the terms “peculiar and intimate” to 
 characterize relations between America and 
 its classic writing connotes “homosexuality” 
 in a readily recognizable, albeit euphemis- 
 
236 Michael Moon 
 
 tically encoded, fifties way. This would be in keeping with Love and 
 Death’s once scandalous thesis: that in the body of writing which 
 D. H. Lawrence had canonized in the twenties as classic Ameri¬ 
 can literature, “mature heterosexuality” (that shibboleth and ever- 
 vanishing horizon of American postwar ego psychology and its an¬ 
 cillary schools of cultural and literary criticism) counts for little or 
 nothing, and its allegedly central place has long been usurped in our 
 literature by romances of interracial, male-homoerotic union—Natty 
 Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck Finn and 
 Jim being among the chief prototypes of these. “Our great novelists 
 . . . tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a 
 woman, which we expect at the center of a novel,” Fiedler laments, 
 asking, “Where is our Madame Bovary, our Anna Karenina, our Pride 
 and Prejudice or Vanity Fair?”^ 
 
 Thirty years later, amid an ongoing series of extraordinary changes 
 in the ways many American women and gay men conceive of and 
 perform our social and political roles, as well as a comparably radical 
 reconception of literary studies in some influential quarters (in the 
 same period, Afro-American studies, gender studies, deconstruction, 
 Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, canon revision, the “new histori- 
 cism,” and other intellectual movements have transformed academic 
 literary discourse), students of American cultural history are pro¬ 
 posing new answers to the kinds of questions Fiedler raised at the 
 beginning of the 1960s. The work of the past decade or so that has 
 most directly empowered those of us concerned with overturning 
 homophobic accounts (like Fiedler’s) of the markedly homoerotic 
 character of American literature has been Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s 
 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of the dynamics of various 
 forms of homosociality throughout the modern period.^ Such influ¬ 
 ential framers of feminist critique of American literary history as 
 Ann Douglas, Annette Kolodny, jane Tompkins, and Cathy Davidson 
 have also contributed significantly to a widespread reassessment of 
 the cultural and, specifically, the gender politics determining and to 
 some degree determined by American writing in its first century.^ 
 
 Early attempts to work out the relation between American litera¬ 
 ture and homosexuality from a gay studies perspective—Robert K. 
 Martin’s The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry is an impor- 
 
Disseminating Whitman 237 
 
 tant and characteristic example—were constrained by their thor¬ 
 oughly traditional and tradition-minded notions of literary history 
 and by their tendency (one they shared with earlier, unsympathetic 
 accounts of the matter like Fiedler’s) to scant or ignore altogether 
 the historicity of homosexuality.' This latter constraint was perhaps 
 inevitable, since the historiography of sexualities, homosexualities 
 certainly included, had not emerged from its subdisciplinary infancy 
 ten years ago. 
 
 A generic divide yawns between Martin’s and Fiedler’s very differ¬ 
 ent kinds of attempts to account for—one positively, the other nega¬ 
 tively—the alleged focus of American writing on the homoerotic. 
 Although he has since written a separate account of Melville’s fiction, 
 Martin’s efforts to secure a male homophilic rather than homophobic 
 American literary canon around Whitman ignore fiction and valorize 
 poetry. Fiedler’s procedure is precisely converse to this: he limits his 
 study strictly to novels. There is much more at stake in such critical 
 practices than simply a conservative desire to maintain the purity 
 of genres. Fiedler makes one of his few forays outside the academic 
 literary canon of the 1950s and 1960s to consider Whitman’s early 
 temperance novel, Franklin Evans, but never once mentions Leaves 
 of Grass even in passing: not only an enormously more influential 
 work of Whitman’s, but also one that would figure in any extended 
 consideration of “love and death” in American writing—and one that 
 radically defies Fiedler’s crude sexual typology (the Pale Maiden and 
 the Dark Lady, the Good Good Boy and the Good Bad Boy) for Ameri¬ 
 can literature. Granted, Fiedler’s book announces in its title that it 
 is a study of prose fiction only, but his substitution of a narrowly 
 defined body of “classic American fiction” (chiefly Brown, Cooper, 
 Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Faulkner) for a canon con¬ 
 ceived in any broader terms, generically or otherwise, has consider¬ 
 able extraliterary consequences. From its first appearance, Fiedler’s 
 book was taken by many to be not merely what it is—an archetype- 
 slinging romp through the then fairly recently installed “strenuous” 
 straight white male canon—but also a work of “general cultural” im¬ 
 port. Lionel Trilling called it “a general cultural history of the nation” 
 and George Steiner asserted that it bore as significantly on the study 
 of “American morals” as it did on American literature.* 
 
238 Michael Moon 
 
 For the past several years I have been studying the work of a small 
 number of American male writers—principally Walt Whitman, Hora¬ 
 tio Alger, and Henry James—whose works taken together collectively 
 violate many of the lines along which American history and liter¬ 
 ary history have long been organized. With regard to history, the 
 work of these three authors represents widely divergent constructions 
 of class, gender, and national identities. With regard to specifically 
 literary-historical issues, they raise questions about the hybridization 
 of genres as well as about canonicity; the relations of each of their 
 respective bodies of work to popular and elite practices and audi¬ 
 ences of the period are complex. As one might well expect, given the 
 conspicuous differences in the social circumstances and aspirations 
 of these three figures and the wide divergences among their literary 
 practices, their writings engage questions of the history and theory 
 of homosexuality in extremely various ways. Far from constituting a 
 “tradition,” homosexual or otherwise, their writings are divided from 
 each other as well as within themselves. Without minimizing the vio¬ 
 lent contradictions with which their writings abound, 1 am interested 
 in trying to resist the historiographical and literary-historiographical 
 conventions which have tended to keep Whitman and James apart, 
 and a writer like Alger away from either of them, and, in so doing, 
 have tended to reify such conventional distinctions as those between 
 fiction and poetry, between producers of popular and elite culture, 
 and between bourgeois writers and those of lower-class origins. 
 
 “Difficult as it will be, it has become . . . imperative to achieve a 
 shifted attitude . . . towards the thought and fact of sexuality, as an 
 element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in lit¬ 
 erature. 1 am not going to argue the question by itself; it does not 
 stand by itself.”^ Whitman wrote these words a hundred years ago, in 
 his 1887 preface, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” and the 
 challenge they pose to students of sexuality, character, personality, 
 the emotions, and literature has still not been fully met, although 
 largely discrete discourses on each of these topics continue to pro¬ 
 liferate today, as they had begun to in Whitman’s youth. With the 
 exception of a few figures like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Christine 
 
Disseminating Whitman 239 
 
 Stansell, American historians have by and large been slow to perceive 
 the extraordinary degree to which discourses on contraception, abor¬ 
 tion, masturbation, prostitution, and homosexuality were engaged 
 in furious dialogue with one another and with other predominantly 
 nonerotic discourses like those of housing, public health, education, 
 domesticity, and nationalism.® Whitman makes the point and sug¬ 
 gests a method of analysis in his emphatic and axiomatic assertion 
 that the question of sexuality “does not stand by itself,” but is at 
 all points interactive with other politics or economies which are for 
 the most part not specifically or obviously erotic ones, such as the 
 network of class- and gender-positions enforced in the culture, of 
 people’s various ways of inhabiting these positions, especially in their 
 respective relations to their own and other people’s bodies and bodily 
 lives, to their work, and to language and writing. Whitman’s writ¬ 
 ing is importantly representative of a range of counterdiscourses first 
 launched in this period against his culture’s elaboration of a phallogo- 
 centric, gender-polarizing code of political and social practices which 
 tended to privatize, domesticize, and pathologize sexualities. These 
 counterdiscourses kept insisting on the fundamentally political and 
 representational character of sexualities within a historical situation 
 in which predominant forces were tending more and more power¬ 
 fully to repress the relation of sexualities to a wide array of other 
 social relations, in significant part by means of a range of medico- 
 forensic discourses which took as their founding assumption that the 
 “truth” or “nature” of sexuality and of bodiliness in general was to 
 be found in the figure of the body conceived of as an isolable and in 
 fact isolated object of discursive analysis and control. 
 
 In the intervening century since Whitman articulated his unwaver¬ 
 ing political opposition to the cultural construction of “the body” 
 as a monolithic entity subject at every point to regulation by the 
 state, innumerable attempts have been made to “argue the question” 
 of sexuality “by itself.” But in asserting that “it does not stand by 
 itself,” Whitman repudiates the fantasy of the self-instantiated, self- 
 instantiating phallus as center and ground of meaning which has been 
 used to underwrite so many modern ideas of sexuality, and of power 
 and politics in general—perhaps nowhere more so than in the United 
 States, where, during the Reagan imperium, we have been witness to 
 
240 Michael Moon 
 
 yet another revival of the Cold War rhetoric of “cocky” machismo, 
 potent preparedness, readiness to strike, to show backbone, muscle, 
 “starch,” uprightness. 
 
 The vocabulary and conceptual framework which structure this 
 notion of the state as a kind of monitory, perpetually turgid diri¬ 
 gible, and the image of its model (male) citizens as themselves a 
 band of heat-seeking missiles poised at permanently rigid attention, 
 entered American political discourse much earlier than my Top Gun 
 metaphors may suggest—as early as the 1840s, during the wave of 
 nationalist fervor which accompanied the outbreak of the so-called 
 Mexican War, a thoroughly successful dress rehearsal for later Ameri¬ 
 can imperialist adventures.® The Mexican War culminated in the idea 
 of the nation’s manifest destiny and the imposition of its powerful 
 new disciplinary culture of self-reliant male rectitude on the entire 
 continent and eventually on the world. Whitman and other writers 
 —Thoreau, Melville—whose work was to be canonized during World 
 War 11 and after as having constituted “the American Renaissance” 
 were young men when this historical process first got going; writers 
 of James’s and Alger’s generation were born into a society in which 
 it was already essentially in place. 
 
 Scholars have been aware of the young Whitman’s strong public 
 support of the Mexican War since the publication in 1920 of his 
 conventionally patriotic Brooklyn Eagle editorials of the mid-1840s, 
 when he was in his mid-twenties.If these were all the writing Whit¬ 
 man had done, the title of Mauricio Gonzalez de la Garza’s study, 
 Walt Whitman: Racista, Imperialista, Antimexicano (1971), might be 
 justified. But Whitman soon moved from this conventional view to 
 radically opposing positions—by following the logic of manifest des¬ 
 tiny “otherwise,” as it were. His critics have been slow to recognize 
 this, for although the poetry continues to exhibit numerous signs of 
 the conventional American political attitudes of its time, from the 
 beginning of the Leaves of Grass project in the mid-1850s, and perhaps 
 even before, the politics informing Whitman’s poetry is not simply 
 a party politics or a nationalist politics, but a radically materialist 
 “body” politics based on novel ideas about the fundamental equality 
 and interchangeability of human bodies and of the desirability of 
 privileging claims to bodily well-being, health, pleasure, and “adven- 
 
Disseminating Whitman 241 
 
 ture” for the masses over more traditional kinds of political claims of 
 power and interest. 
 
 Opposing his society’s imposition of increasingly rigid constraints 
 over sexualities was of course a central concern of Whitman’s par¬ 
 ticular brand of corporeal utopianism. The terms of the mostly ster¬ 
 ile debate over whether sexualities are fundamentally biological or 
 cultural phenomena, whether they are inborn or learned, divinely 
 ordained or casually picked up on street corners, were first set in 
 this country in the disciplinary discourses of sexuality which began 
 to pour from American presses in the 1830s and 1840s. The pseudo¬ 
 physics concerning the dynamics of the “sex drives” and the pseudo¬ 
 theology concerning which of these “drives” were healthy, natural, 
 and creative, and which were perverted, sick, and destructive, were 
 first worked out in the United States in a massive, only recently re¬ 
 covered, “advice” literature. Here, in the case of “advice,” the scare 
 quotes seem in order, since this “advice” was in fact ferociously, even 
 terroristically, enforced with increasing relentlessness over the course 
 of the century. As anyone who has read around in this literature 
 knows, sexuality was vehemently made to “stand by itself” in the 
 Jacksonian period, in a plethora of pamphlets, tracts, lectures, news¬ 
 paper articles, conduct books and manuals which demonized all forms 
 of nonconjugal, nonprocreative sexual desires and behaviors." 
 
 Even as sexuality “[did] not stand by itself” for Whitman, neither 
 had it stood by itself for his elders in the freethinking, artisanal 
 social and political milieu into which he was born. Sean Wilentz, in 
 his 1985 work on the labor history of early New York City, Chants 
 Democratic —a book which is indebted to Whitman’s writing not 
 only for its title but for other crucial elements of its discourse— 
 has provided an illuminating account of this milieu during the de¬ 
 cades of Whitman’s childhood and adolescence, showing the coher¬ 
 ence of its nascent labor politics with, among other things, its radi¬ 
 cal new attitudes toward sexual behavior.'^ Robert Dale Owen, son 
 of the reformer Robert Owen, was, along with the celebrated Scots¬ 
 woman Frances Wright, the leading ideologue of this movement. Be¬ 
 sides operating a “Hall of Science” with Wright which functioned as 
 a social and political center for workers, and writing and publishing 
 the newspaper Free Enquirer with her (Whitman’s father was a sub- 
 
242 Michael Moon 
 
 scriber), Owen contributed to the movement for workers’ autonomy 
 by publishing in 1830 the first book on birth control to appear in 
 the United States, Moral Physiology: or, a Brief and Plain Treatise on 
 the Population Question. The second work on birth control to appear 
 here, Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, followed in 1832. These 
 books’ treatment of conjugal union, and of sexual indulgence in gen¬ 
 eral, as actions that could happily be detached from their hitherto 
 supposedly inevitable biological consequences encountered furious 
 opposition. The flood of books denouncing solitary sexual indulgence 
 that followed in the immediate wake of the birth control manuals 
 was no doubt a part of the general movement to resist fundamen¬ 
 tal changes in ideas of sexuality and in sexual practices that tended 
 to be compatible with other practices promoting personal autonomy. 
 The anonymous pamphlet Solitary Vice Considered, the first of count¬ 
 less nineteenth-century American efforts to identify masturbation as 
 the cause of a wide range of disastrous effects, appeared in 1831, the 
 year after Owens’s birth control book. Three years later, Sylvester 
 Graham published his Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, a founding 
 document of the American male-purity movement. In his preface to 
 the printed version of his lecture, Graham claimed to have set up 
 shop as male-purity author in response to a widespread demand from 
 young men that a strong counterdiscourse be produced to the wave of 
 books that had recently begun to appear which tended (in Graham’s 
 words) “to encourage illicit and promiscuous commerce between the 
 sexes.” Rather than being the explicitly pornographic or “libertine” 
 productions one might expect, the books in question undoubtedly in¬ 
 cluded, according to Nissenbaum, Owens’s and Knowlton’s pioneer¬ 
 ing works on the practice of birth control. In 1835, the year after the 
 publication of Graham’s influential lecture, Samuel B. Woodward, 
 sometime superintendent of the Worcester, Massachusetts, lunatic 
 asylum, began making his much-discussed reports to the Massachu¬ 
 setts legislature and to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of his 
 discovery that masturbation “caused” insanity; and in the same year. 
 Reverend John Todd of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, published The Stu¬ 
 dent’s Manual, another milestone in the male-purity movement and 
 a book that went through edition after edition in both the United 
 States and in England for the rest of the century. 
 
Disseminating Whitman 243 
 
 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued that when male-purity writers 
 threatened their readers with disease, disgrace, and premature death 
 for masturbating, they were inveighing—with undecidably varying 
 degrees of awareness of their actual targets—against a whole range 
 of emergent social forms of male autonomy, including what was sub¬ 
 sequently conceptualized (at the end of the century) as male homo¬ 
 sexuality and the embryonic urban, male-homosexual subculture of 
 streets, taverns, and brothels, for all of which “onanism” served as 
 a highly elastic label.The difficulty, indeed to a great extent the 
 impossibility, of recovering much of the early social history of this 
 proto-male-homosexual subculture and the behaviors and institu¬ 
 tions it fostered and which in turn fostered it, has been widely rec¬ 
 ognized; what can still be recovered, however, are the discourses 
 which structured people’s perceptions and conceptualizations of the 
 relations between erotic and nonerotic practices. 
 
 It is important for a historian of sexualities to see, for exam¬ 
 ple, that homophobia was among the chief effects of the prolifer¬ 
 ating discourses of the 1830s and 1840s which condemned all forms 
 of nonreproductive sexual behavior, as well as the chief effect of 
 similarly and simultaneously proliferating discourses of “manliness” 
 —masculine self-making and self-reliance—and nationalist-militarist 
 practices. Although one of the most frequently employed euphemisms 
 for masturbation was “the solitary vice,” from the 1830s forward it 
 was the social pursuit of this nominally solitary activity that is a 
 constant target of anti-onanist writing. This discourse crystallizes 
 around the figure of the depraved individual—servant, older relative, 
 or older child—who, by teaching the young to masturbate, intro¬ 
 duces sexual difference and sexual desire into what American moral- 
 purity writers represent as the previously innocent—which is to say 
 asexual—homosocial environments to which the young are com¬ 
 mitted. Even in supposedly super-repressive Puritan New England, 
 attitudes toward extracurricular sex education seem not to have been 
 as virulent as they became in the period 1 am discussing. In a letter 
 of 1672, for example, the Reverend Thomas Shepard, Jr., of Charles¬ 
 town, Massachusetts, son of the great Puritan preacher, coolly cau¬ 
 tioned his son, who was about to enter Harvard, to avoid those of his 
 fellows such as “there are and will be ... in every scholastic society 
 
244 Michael Moon 
 
 ... as will teach you how to be filthy.”''' Shepard’s tone seems seri¬ 
 ous and casual at the same time; in comparison with the male-purity 
 writers of a century and a half later, it is strikingly unhysterical about 
 the fair certainty that his son will be sexually importuned by some of 
 his associates at college. His tone suggests that he recognizes this as 
 a structural feature, so to speak, of all-male environments—Puritan 
 Harvard not excepted—and that while he strongly desires that his 
 son avoid such sexual “instruction,” he accepts without approving, 
 as his society generally does, that boys will be “filthy”—not all boys, 
 they imagine, but some. And as Roger Thompson has recently ob¬ 
 served of Shepard’s letter, “As a Harvard graduate himself, [Shepard] 
 presumably wrote from experience.”'^ 
 
 To cast forward to a text from the very end of the nineteenth century, 
 a full half-century after the first heyday of the anti-onanist writers, 
 to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), one has only to recall 
 how much in the tale turns on the mystery (or nonmystery) of little 
 Miles’s having been sent down from school for shocking misconduct 
 toward some of his schoolmates—conduct into which he may have 
 earlier been initiated by the literally haunting figure of Peter Quint 
 —to perceive how resonant the figures of the boy and his corrupter, 
 figures first disseminated on a mass scale in male-purity discourse, 
 remained in the imaginations of James and many of his readers. 
 
 Before going on to consider further the dissemination of figures of 
 anti-onanist terrorist writing through some of James’s other work, 1 
 want to consider a text of Whitman’s which was contemporaneous 
 with the early male-purity discourse. This is a story entitled “The 
 Child’s Champion,” which Whitman published in 1841 when he was 
 twenty-two.'* It initially appeared in a popular weekly called the New 
 World, on which he was working as a compositor at the time. (The 
 New World was one of the first two mass-circulation “story papers” 
 established in the United States in the late 1830s.)“The Child’s 
 Champion” tells a sentimental story about a twelve-year-old boy, the 
 son of a poor widow, whose body and spirit are being crushed by the 
 cruel master to whom he is apprenticed. On the way back to his mas¬ 
 ter’s from a brief visit to his mother, the boy Charles stops to gaze 
 
Disseminating Whitman 245 
 
 through an open tavern tvindow at a ro\vdy drinking party taking 
 place inside. He is hauled through the window by a drunken, one- 
 eyed sailor who attempts to force him to drink alcohol. When the boy 
 refuses because he has promised his mother never to drink, the sailor 
 begins to beat him. Fortunately for Charles, telling the sailor about 
 his mother’s wish rouses a dissipated but prosperous-looking young 
 man named John Lankton to come to his defense. Having taken an in¬ 
 stantaneous and strong liking to Charles, Lankton promises to rescue 
 him immediately from his cruel master and further resolves to mend 
 his own dissipated habits, all on the strength of his newfound tie to 
 the boy. Charles is said at this point to require “little persuading” to 
 accept Lankton’s invitation to stay with him at the inn and share his 
 bed. The story ends with the apparition of an angel who blesses and 
 kisses the boy and the young man in turn. In the closing lines, the 
 narrator invites the “loved reader” to linger over the “moral of this 
 simple story.” 
 
 Perhaps the most striking quality of “The Child’s Champion” as a 
 literary text is its dense figuration in terms of liquidity—the story is 
 full of figures of drinking, spilling, weeping, sweating, soaking, and 
 flooding. In the context of the rest of Whitman’s writing this text 
 would be disseminated through a poetic practice designed to repre¬ 
 sent the “fluidity” of identities between males. The fantasy of male 
 selves flowing in and out of each other and dissolving into each other 
 is an impelling one in this and other early texts of Whitman’s, includ¬ 
 ing most of the poems that constituted the first, great 1855 edition of 
 Leaves of Grass, poems that were later entitled “Song of Myself,” “1 
 Sing the Body Electric,” “The Sleepers.” The story’s representations 
 of “fluid” practices, including oral ones, and of “fluidity” between 
 males take on as well the charged significance of drinking in ante¬ 
 bellum culture (the first mass temperance movement in the United 
 States was contemporaneous with the male-purity movement). 
 
 What particularly interests me about the story is the fidelity with 
 which it projects the outlines of what would prove to be one of the 
 most popular literary forms of the post-Civil War era, the rags-to- 
 riches, or, more precisely, rags-to-respectability, stories of Horatio 
 Alger: the boy’s initial abjection—in “The Child’s Champion,” his 
 weeping with his mother over his helplessness in the grip of his cruel 
 
246 Michael Moon 
 
 master; his extremely labile relation to older males—the master who 
 enslaves him, the sailor who beats him, the young gentleman who 
 rescues him from them; the way in which his intensified abjection 
 at the hands of an abusive older male (the drunken sailor) is repre¬ 
 sented as precipitating, as if with the force of a natural law, the boy’s 
 “rescue” from abjection, his being fatefully “drawn up,” Ganymede- 
 like, across previously intractable class lines, into the heaven of senti¬ 
 mental relationship between males and the predominantly masculine 
 versions of domesticity and affluence which are the precincts of these 
 privileged relations. Taken together, these formulae represent the dy¬ 
 namics of a male-sentimental master-narrative which is one of the 
 principal forms of the counterdiscourse to the powerful new disci¬ 
 plinary culture of self-reliant male rectitude of the 1830s and 1840s— 
 an oppositional dynamics which is as clearly delineated in Whitman’s 
 1841 tale as it will be in Alger’s “success” stories of a quarter-century 
 and more later. 
 
 Each of Alger’s books represents the intensely male-homosocial 
 fraternity of proletarian streetboy life magically transformed for the 
 “exceptional” boy—again, as in “The Child’s Champion,” by bour¬ 
 geois-male intervention “from above”—into the scene of settled con¬ 
 jugal domesticity which the culture projected as its ideal civilian goal 
 of male self-fashioning. James’s disapproval of the child figures who 
 emerged in the new postwar literature of children’s series books pro¬ 
 duced by writers like Alger and Louisa May Alcott is registered, for 
 instance, in his 1875 review in The Nation of Alcott’s Eight Cousins, 
 in which he complains that the little girls in such books “are apt to 
 be pert and shrill, [and] the little boys to be aggressive and know¬ 
 ing.”'® Yet perhaps no other body of writing registers more exten¬ 
 sively than James’s frequently does the persistence in late nineteenth- 
 century American culture of the scenes of boyhood abjection first 
 elaborated in the male-purity writing of the 1830s and 1840s. In some 
 ways, James tends to make his boy characters as definitively abject, 
 as impervious to what Hugh Kenner has called (in relation to Alger’s 
 writing) “the paradigms of ascent,” as similar boy figures are in the 
 terrorist narratives of the antimasturbation tracts. 
 
 1 have already mentioned Miles in The Turn of the Screw, who 
 expires in the culminating moments of that story, as does the boy 
 
Disseminating Whitman 247 
 
 protagonist of James’s 1891 tale “The Pupil,” a story which is curi¬ 
 ously and belatedly poised between a male-purity model of boyish 
 abjection and the male sentimental model of rescue by an older male 
 which was designed to sublate boyhood abjection: the “pupil” liter¬ 
 ally dies from the intensity of his emotional response to finally being 
 released from his unhappy family to go make the home of his dreams 
 with his beloved tutor, and from seeing the tutor hesitate momen¬ 
 tarily when the boy’s parents propose to him that he take the boy 
 off. The homophobic implications of the figure of the abject boy in 
 male-purity writing are palpable as well in the figure of the little boy 
 who dies in James’s “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884): the boy dies 
 as a “punishment” for and/or a required “sacrifice” to his father’s 
 homosexuality—or, more precisely, the homosexuality of his author- 
 father’s writing. Yet in tales like “The Middle Years” (1893) and “The 
 Great Good Place” (1900), in which the predominant subject position 
 is neither that of the abject boy nor his adult male protector or cor¬ 
 rupter but that of an older man who either lacks an articulated erotic 
 focus or loves a younger adult male, there emerge scenes of male fos¬ 
 terage and male domesticity of the kind enshrined in texts like “The 
 Child’s Champion” and Alger’s boys’ books. 
 
 Alger admired James’s fiction so much that he paid him a double 
 hommage in his 1890 boys’ book The Erie Train Boy, which briefly 
 features a young female character from Albany named Isabel Archer 
 and another young female character who, like Daisy Miller, mistakes 
 a comely young Italian man of little or no social significance for an 
 eligible gentleman.” Alger’s apparent inability to perceive class dif¬ 
 ferences in any terms other than the crude and inflexible ones of his 
 mechanical “paradigm,” which transforms sexually attractive street- 
 boys into small-time corporate capitalists, results in the probably un¬ 
 witting but nonetheless delicious irony of Isabel Archer’s and Daisy 
 Miller’s unexpected and incongruous appearances in this late tale of 
 his—delicious because the irony cuts two ways, not only against the 
 banality and iron simplemindedness which characterizes Alger’s fic¬ 
 tion but also against the simultaneous suppression and promotion of 
 class arrogance in much of James’s fiction. 
 
 It is very unlikely that James was ever aware of Alger’s tipping 
 of his hat to him. James, who could admire so little of his contem- 
 
248 Michael Moon 
 
 poraries’ writing, not even much of that of a supposedly kindred 
 spirit like Edith Wharton, certainly could not admire Alger’s work. 
 Given this fact, it comes as a slight surprise to find James in 1902 
 proclaiming himself an extremely enthusiastic reader of a new pop 
 genre that had emerged in that year: the first, and still the arche¬ 
 typal western, Owen Wister’s The Virginian. In his only published 
 letter to Wister (who was the grandson of a friend of James’s youth, 
 the celebrated actress Frances Kemble), James expresses his excite¬ 
 ment in terms that may sound distinctly un-Jamesian: “What I best 
 like in it,” he writes Wister, “is exactly the fact of the subject itself, 
 . . . the exhibition, to the last intimacy . . . of your hero.”“ Wis¬ 
 ter’s tale relates the story of an ungainly, middle-aged eastern gentle¬ 
 man’s life-transforming fascination and friendship “out west” with 
 the first slow-walkin’, slow-talkin’ cowboy in fiction (the Virginian’s 
 most famous “line” is that quintessentially American-male response 
 to homosocial provocation of many kinds: “Smile when you call me 
 that”). When The Virginian shifts from its, for James (and no doubt 
 for many other readers), idyllic male-male phase to its inevitable 
 homophobic phase—the Virginian is finally represented as outgrow¬ 
 ing his burdensome memories of his dead buddy Steve and marrying 
 an attractive and spunky schoolmarm from Vermont—^James does not 
 hesitate to tell Wister that he has what he calls strong “reserves” 
 about what is for him this problematic ending. “I am willing to throw 
 out, even though you don’t ask me, that nothing would have induced 
 me to unite [the Virginian] to the little Vermont person, or to dedi¬ 
 cate him in fact to achieved parentage, prosperity, maturity, at all—- 
 which is mere prosaic justice, and rather grim at that.” James then 
 really drops the veil, as it were, about the sources of his pleasure in 
 reading Wister; he writes of the Virginian: “I thirst for his blood. I 
 wouldn’t have let him live and be happy: I should have made him 
 perish in his flower and in some splendid noble way.” James then 
 directs Wister to Pierre Loti’s Vecheur d’islande (1886)—perhaps the 
 most pungently male homoerotic novel about a sailor before Jean 
 Genet’s Querelle de Brest —as a good example of possible ways of 
 “improving” the ending of The Virginian. 
 
 In the context of the model of abjection and rescue between higher- 
 class man and lower-class boy that I have been discussing, the inter- 
 
Disseminating Whitman 249 
 
 esting thing about James’s vampiric rewriting of Wister’s western (“I 
 thirst for his blood”) is the way it nakedly exposes the violent and 
 sadistic fantasy of the pleasure James imagines taking in planning and 
 carrying out the narratorial execution of the book’s handsome hero 
 (“1 should have made him perish in his flower”) alongside this fan¬ 
 tasy’s sublation into the traditional terms of the idealizing aesthetics 
 of romance and/or tragedy (“in some splendid noble way”). James 
 was writing The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors around the 
 time he sent Wister his “suggestions” for The Virginian; although he 
 foregrounds male homoerotic attraction and male homosocial com¬ 
 petition more thoroughly in these two extraordinary novels than in 
 any of his other writings, they contain no language to compare with 
 the candidly sado-erotic relish of his revision of Wister’s lower-class 
 (in terms of genre) account of his lower-class hero. 
 
 In his youth, James wrote a famously dismissive review in The 
 Nation of Whitman’s Civil War poems; later, he expressed his deep 
 appreciation of the poet in a review of a posthumously published vol¬ 
 ume of Whitman’s letters to his boyfriend Peter Doyle.In the long 
 period between 1865 and 1898, the respective dates of these reviews, 
 James seems to have remained silent about Whitman’s work, even 
 while some of his British friends and acquaintances were praising the 
 poet in print, entering into correspondence with him, proclaiming 
 him (if, for some time, only to one another) the heroic founder of 
 the male homoerotic literary cult of “Calamus,” and going so far as to 
 visit him at his home in Camden, New Jersey.^^ Whitman, on his side, 
 is on record as (quite unsurprisingly) having found James’s writing 
 all “feathers,” as he put it. In his last years. Whitman several times 
 in conversation contrasted what he called the “vogue” of the younger 
 Henry James (“surely his vogue won’t last,” he says) with the far 
 superior achievements of Henry James, Sr.: the elder James’s free- 
 floating reflections on metaphysics, mystical theology, and the desir¬ 
 ability of society’s rearranging sexual relations—a not uncharacteris¬ 
 tic configuration of topics in elite discourse of the antebellum period 
 —were understandably more to Whitman’s liking.” The complex cir¬ 
 cuitry of the relations of Whitman’s writings to the striations of class 
 in late nineteenth-century American society are nowhere more evi¬ 
 dent than in his gesture of sending one of his working-class boyfriends 
 
250 Michael Moon 
 
 —once again, Peter Doyle—the uncharacteristic gift of a book rather 
 than the usual dollar or a new shirt. When he did so, the book Whit¬ 
 man sent was notably not something like Alger’s Luke Larkin’s Luck 
 or Risen from the Ranks; it was Regina Maria Roche’s 1796 gothic ro¬ 
 mance, The Children of the Abbey?’' Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading 
 of the shifting tensions between homophobia and homosexual panic 
 in relation to changes in the writing of English gothic fiction of the 
 late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides one richly 
 suggestive context in which to consider the possible significance of 
 Whitman’s gift. The persistence of a limited although fairly labile 
 repertory of scenes of boyhood abjection sublated into sentimental 
 male domesticity in some of the writings of Whitman, Alger, and 
 James suggests another, not unrelated context in which to consider 
 Whitman’s gift. 
 
 Whitman’s difficulties with the emergent realist fiction of his own 
 time are well known: he disliked William Dean Howells’s novels 
 almost as much as he did James’s. He remained a loyal partisan of 
 the romances for which he had shared a passion with his mother 
 in his boyhood—books like Scott’s Ivanhoe, Cooper’s The Wept of 
 Wish-ton-Wish, and George Sand’s Consuelo?^ The most audaciously 
 experimental poet of the English-speaking world in his time sustained 
 to the end of his life what has generally been taken to have been a 
 highly conservative, even reactionary attitude toward contempora¬ 
 neous developments in fiction. 
 
 I would relate Whitman’s refusal to admire realist fiction to his 
 commitment to disseminating a different model of writing and of 
 writing’s determinate relations to sexuality and social class, a com¬ 
 mitment which—as much as any other reason that might be advanced 
 —because of the increasing predominance of homophobia in Ameri¬ 
 can society from the 1830s forward, could never be central to the 
 realist enterprise. Certain forms of the romantic fiction Whitman and 
 his mother read and regaled each other with in his youth seem to con¬ 
 tinue to represent for him, on the one hand, certain terrorized and 
 foreclosed possibilities of collaboration between a range of feminine, 
 feminist, and/or maternal counterdiscourses in his culture, and, on 
 the other, a range of antimilitarist, antinationalist, antihomophobic 
 counterdiscourses. In the master narrative 1 have described, the ab- 
 
Disseminating Whitman 251 
 
 ject boy is inevitably “drawn upward” and recovered for a scene of 
 male domesticity and affluence from which the equally abject mother 
 —and, along with her, the femininity she metonymically represents 
 —is excluded. To try to reread male sentimental and male domestic 
 fictions through the lenses of female sentimental and female domestic 
 fictions, and to try to understand if not to justify their often unedify¬ 
 ing collusions and exclusions, is one way of participating in an effort 
 that has been ongoing for a very long time; an effort to resist the 
 political forces in the United States that have been deforming and 
 destroying human lives inside and outside this country for the past 
 century and a half. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1966), 23. 
 
 2 Ibid., 24-25. 
 
 3 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s work on homosocial spheres has been collected in her 
 book Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 
 1985). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theorizes about the relations among male homosoci¬ 
 ality, male homosexuality, homophobia, and heterosexuality in Between Men: 
 English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985): see especially 
 1-5, 21-27. 
 
 4 See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977); An¬ 
 nette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in Ameri¬ 
 can Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, 1975) and The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Ex¬ 
 perience of the American Frontiers. 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1984); Jane Tompkins, 
 Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York, 
 1985): and Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in 
 America (New York, 1986). 
 
 5 Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin, 1979). 
 
 6 Trilling’s and Steiner’s encomia appear as blurbs on the back jacket of the 1966 
 Dell paperback edition of Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. 
 
 7 Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” in Walt Whitman: 
 Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, compiled by Justin Kaplin (New York, 1982), 
 669. 
 
 8 Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct; and Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex 
 and Class in New York 1789-1860 (New York, 1986). 
 
 9 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cam¬ 
 bridge, Mass., 1950), 44-48, provides a standard account of this topic. Robert W. 
 Johannsen situates Whitman in the broader cultural context of American re¬ 
 sponses to the Mexican War in To the Halls of Montezuma: The Mexican War in 
 
252 Michael Moon 
 
 the American Imagination (New York, 1985), 38, 50-51, 97, no, 115, 133, 308. I 
 draw my “rehearsal” metaphor for the long-term political significance of America’s 
 Mexican adventure from Alfred H. Bill's centenary study of the war. Rehearsal for 
 Conflict: The War with Mexico 1846-1848 (New York, 1947). Some contemporary 
 American historians have ceased to study “manifest destiny” as such, preferring 
 to break down what they see as an enormously complex phenomenon into its 
 component aspects. The entry for “manifest destiny” in the index of Richard Drin- 
 non’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New 
 York, 1980) is significant; it reads simply, “See Racism: Nationalism; Imperialism; 
 Colonialism.” 
 
 10 Walt Whitman, The Gathering of the Forces, ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black 
 (New York, 1920). 
 
 n See Ronald G. Walters, Vrimers for Prudery (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974): Carroll 
 Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity; An Ethnohistorical Analysis 
 of Jacksonian America,” American Journal of Sociology, supp., 84 (1978): 212- 
 47: and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes 
 Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1976): 
 see especially 155-62 and 163-74. There is a rare original copy of the pamphlet 
 Solitary Vice Considered in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society, 
 Worcester, Massachusetts. 
 
 12 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic (New York. 1985). Eor Wilentz’s account of the 
 milieu of Wright and Owen’s Free Enquirer, see especially 176-82. 
 
 13 See Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity.” 
 
 14 Shepard’s letter is quoted in Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex (Amherst, 1986), 
 58. 
 
 15 Ibid., 58n. 
 
 16 “The Child’s Champion” appears under its subsequent (1844) title, “The Child and 
 the Profligate,” in Walt Whitman: The Early Poetry and the Eiction, ed. Thomas L. 
 Brasher (New York, 1963). 
 
 17 For more about the New World and the early years of the mass publishing market 
 in the United States, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and 
 Working-Class Culture in America (New York. 1987). 9-61. 
 
 18 James’s review is reprinted in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeleine 
 B. Stern (Boston, 1984), 165-66. 
 
 19 Alger was acquainted with the James family. He interviewed Henry James, Sr., for 
 the biography of the actor Edwin Forrest on which he collaborated with his cousin, 
 the litterateur William Rounseville Alger. Alger had been expelled from the Uni¬ 
 tarian ministry in 1866 for engaging in sexual activities with his boy parishioners. 
 The members of the James family (at least the male ones) seem to have been 
 aware of this, and William James, with whom he seems to have spoken about his 
 troubles freely, may have been the last person with whom he ever discussed the 
 matter. (See Gary Scharnhorst with Jack Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. 
 [Bloomington: 1985], 70.) Henry James. Sr., wrote to his novelist son of Alger’s 
 visit: “Alger talks freely about his own late insanity—which he in fact appears 
 
Disseminating Whitman 253 
 
 to enjoy as a subject of conversation and in which I believe he has somewhat 
 interested William [James], who has talked with him a good deal of his experience 
 at the Somerville Asylum.” The younger Henry James quotes his father’s letter in 
 Notes of a Son and Brother, reprinted in Frederick W. Dupee, ed., Henry James: 
 Autobiography (Princeton, 1956), qoi. 
 
 20 Henry James, Letters, 1895-1916, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 4: 252- 
 34 - 
 
 21 Both reviews are reprinted in Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage, ed. Milton 
 Hindus (London, 1971), 110-14, 159-60. 
 
 22 Perhaps we may take James’s contribution to a collection for Whitman in 1885 as 
 a sign of his private good will toward the poet. See Horace Traubel, With Walt 
 Whitman in Camden, ed. Sculley Bradley (Philadelphia, 1953), 4: 210. Edith Whar¬ 
 ton gives a well-known description of James reading Whitman aloud in fervent 
 tones in her memoirs (title borrowed from Whitman’s "A Backward Glance O’er 
 Travel’d Roads”), A Backward Glance, which is “interesting, if true,” as American 
 newspapers used to head news stories they had not yet been able to verify at press 
 time. 
 
 23 See Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden. 
 
 24 See Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York, 
 1961), 2: 245. 
 
 25 Whitman compares Howells with James in Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Cam¬ 
 den (New York, 1915), i: 78. He invidiously compares the younger with the elder 
 Henry James for a second time in the sixth volume of Traubel’s With Walt Whitman 
 in Camden, ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White (Carbondale and Edwards- 
 ville, 1982), 34-35. After this last devaluation of James’s fiction. Whitman goes on 
 to praise Cooper’s and Scott’s novels extensively, beginning by saying, “Cooper is 
 way better than Hawthorne—50 percent better” (35-36). In Whitman’s compari¬ 
 son of Hawthorne to Cooper he may be expressing a belief that as the cultural 
 ascendency of the former over the latter developed and persisted in the second 
 half of the nineteenth century, American fiction “got off the track” of the kind of 
 sweeping social and political point of view which Cooper’s writing represents for 
 Whitman onto what seemed to him to be a different, inferior “track” of “Haw- 
 thornean” fiction, which valorized the introspective, the psychological, and the 
 fragmentary—the kind of writing of which he saw James and Howells as notable 
 young practitioners. 
 
A . 
 
 
 
 ' ■'.j 
 
 ym -K,... f^ <'• 
 
 /•■•'rtnv. li'-i '■‘li^''» *n? " 
 
 ‘"■.'Vt ?V^'.-, .i'-jtiggr^jgK-Byqv- .. 
 
 .. <] •■;: 
 
 ' ' < I * * rWyygSiW Fl t : i • *^rMix,.;]^^4s^ * 
 
 *l}v'-^»;J ’^.^* l> '^ V i'(‘t/ . * >1^ An ■ 
 
 i / .1.- ../'. Iw .-e. mSSSIKm t 
 
 
 WAQIHRr ^ ' i’ 
 
 f'.^!» ^)fc (f.iVA I- • ih J^* 
 
 ■feih( '.'t-'S n^**^ ^‘* 
 
 (»• •.?0_\ l'l7'^’)vf ^^ r 1"'’ 'j^/M^IUlnSSrll 
 ■. .* ‘. .1 _ < 4 * .^ ' ,, 
 
 ^.'AVl .. . ' ii .rtt I ' r ^ 4. / •> wi . tl'Jti t, 
 
 f' V ''^ , :-‘i'‘x jM .'.V^ !'iL tP7 Wh 
 
 ijvfi'Jy-); *V;t,. i i'yi.A’ 
 
 . - a. I ^ . i .. ' t . >■ 4 i ^V . 
 
 •*fVV ^ fj* •-.• •?' i'4 • ■- *,••-- jji -•• -• --_ r 
 
 t,)...HWV*' -■ 
 
 
 ry^ 
 
 'tw 
 
 At^l, ^ i ’f' 
 
 ttWJ •> ^^-rai 1/ 
 
 iltWfrJ*'''ll 4 t-l^ .BS''< 'VlKP^ 
 
 \-H K. viO ■ ■ ' ’ • >'"<1 i _’ ’ 
 
 (, 1 ,. ..'i.l ., . •1,7: ^:' •' 
 
 i, , ? U 1' > • v i ?; - 
 
 - •11.^' n-l’i'iJyfell 
 [i< (/‘.iW V-'" 'V jjin ■ 
 
 . 4kJiikf<titiAry| 
 
 1 ^ 1 ^ ' '.‘1 V' 
 
 
 lllj 
 
 .4 \'f ..■4,fiih' ^rv'T^'W- 
 
 
Robert L. Caserio 
 
 Supreme Court Discourse vs. 
 Homosexual Fiction 
 
 A. Miller’s essay on the role of the 
 police in Bleak House is already a classic, five 
 years after its appearance in Representations. 
 The stature of the essay, collected now in 
 Miller’s The Novel and the Police, illustrates 
 the thoroughness with which critics have 
 turned from the formalist study of narrative 
 to the study of narrative as a form of ideology. 
 But there has been too little questioning of 
 this latest trend’s most significant element: 
 suspicion of any novel’s effort to provide an 
 alternative to the ideologies and politics that 
 prevail in the world in which the novel is 
 produced and read. 
 
 In The Novel and the Police, Miller asserts 
 that the narrative ideology of Bleak House 
 participates in a general project of novelis- 
 tic narrative—that is, to produce for readers 
 a “sheltered space,” outside the realms of 
 public and institutional life. In fact. Miller 
 says, “that sheltered space ... is uncondi¬ 
 tionally taken for granted in the novel form, 
 whose unfolding and consumption has not 
 ceased to occur in such a space all along. 
 
256 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 . . . [T]he novel counts among the conditions for this consumption 
 the consumer’s leisured withdrawal to the private, domestic sphere.” 
 Depending upon this situation of consumption, the novel thus con¬ 
 stitutes “every novel-reading subject . . . within the categories of the 
 individual, the inward, the domestic.” “The domestic” is a term that 
 brings together the privacy of individual life and the sphere of family 
 influence. Thus “the only significant attempt to transcend the indi¬ 
 vidualism projected by the novel took place precisely in Victorian 
 England as the practice of family reading," but this attempt appears 
 not to have succeeded, since it merely intensifies the privacy and 
 inwardness underwritten by family and genre alike.' Unqualifiedly, 
 then, the novel is the producer and the product of an ideology of 
 privacy, understood as a liberating alternative to the public realm. 
 
 What is most at issue in Miller’s analysis—as Miller sees it—is any 
 novel’s attempt, not just Bleak House's, to make the individual, the 
 inward, and the domestic into ideological alternatives to the ideologi¬ 
 cal powers of the courts and the police. Thus Miller’s Dickens means 
 to set up an oppositional “outside” to established power, a sheltered 
 space “occupied by an ideal of family,” the variant of the individual 
 and the inward. But Miller intends to shake up Dickens’s ambition 
 and to undo the novel’s generic pride, its claim that it “views the 
 world [from its self-appointed shelter] in better, more clear-sighted 
 and disinterested ways than the world views itself.” The model for 
 this pride turns out to be a nefarious form of supervision, “a radi¬ 
 cal entanglement [of] the nature of the novel and the practice of 
 the police.” So Miller thinks that even the sheltered family space in 
 Dickens harbors the antagonistic ideologies—the oppressive judging 
 and policing—that the family is supposed to curtail. And the very 
 narrative which carries Bleak House’s Esther and Allan to their ideal 
 “outside” is only one of the voices in which Dickens “does” the police. 
 Privacy and domesticity, supposed to be a refuge from power’s op¬ 
 pressions, mime their opponent, and make the “outside” of power the 
 twin of power. Miller concludes that Dickens’s “rigorous reformism 
 makes better sense as an undeclared defense of the status quo.”^ 
 
 When we read in The Novel and the Police that “whenever the 
 novel censures policing power, it has already reinvented it, in the 
 very practice of novelistic representation,” we are to assume that nar- 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 257 
 
 rative, one of the novel’s principal representational modes, is also 
 a nefarious policing agent.’ This view is in step with the method 
 and aim of the study of narrative as a form of ideology—ideologi¬ 
 cal narrative poetics—which comes to us originally from Althusser, 
 Foucault, and Pierre Macherey, Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton: 
 narratives, they tell us, always make better sense if they are regarded 
 as undeclared defenses of the status quo. And this, they say, is espe¬ 
 cially because novelistic narratives cultivate the categories of the 
 individual, the inward, and the domestic. Miller glances nervously 
 at Marxism—at Eagleton specifically—because Marxism appears to 
 Miller to be self-deceptively optimistic about art’s subversion of the 
 world’s all-supervising structures. But no less than Miller, Eagleton 
 sees the individual and the inward as the other side of the coin of 
 public and economic oppression. In Criticism and Ideology “the in¬ 
 dividual” appears to Eagleton as only a deadlocked categorical alter¬ 
 native to the sterile ideology of “organic” society. Although Eagleton 
 sees “the fissuring of organic form” as a liberating step in the genre’s 
 progress, we can surmise how Miller’s scrupulous skepticism would 
 react to this alleged liberation.’ Miller asserts that there is “a whole 
 range of practices whereby our culture has become increasingly adept 
 in taking benefit of doubt.”’ Would one of these profitable (hence 
 conservative) practices be the doubting of narrative that issues in the 
 fissuring of organic form and of one of organic form’s possible models, 
 the family? 
 
 Modern and postmodern novels would seem to be simultaneously 
 antidomestic and antinarrative narratives. But the reader who over¬ 
 sees these doubt-created fissurings of narratives and organic forms 
 must be a magisterial private detective. If he is not, he will be unable 
 to read—to follow the tracks of, say, Finnegans Wake or, for another 
 example, of Beckett’s funny version of Bucket, the Moran of MoIIoy. 
 The modern and postmodern reader, then, by virtue of his elite in¬ 
 terpretative agency, arguably is still served by at least two categories 
 constitutive of fiction: the categories of the individual and the in¬ 
 ward. By opening up an ahistorical and apolitical “sheltered space” 
 for their readers, antinarratives no less than narratives might be said 
 to maintain an undeclared defense of the status quo. Eor such works 
 would constitute their readers as private doubles of the agencies of 
 
258 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 detection and judgment that keep the established world weightily in 
 place. 
 
 This critical method of seeing underlying productive likenesses 
 below the appearance of exclusive antagonisms is a powerful one, to 
 be sure. 1 make use of the same method in part of this essay. But inso¬ 
 far as the aim of ideological narrative poetics is to be in its own way a 
 detective and a judiciary force dedicated to the arrest of equations of 
 narrative with subversions of the status quo, 1 am skeptical. No less 
 than Miller 1 too suspect the categories of the individual and the in¬ 
 ward—especially when those categories give special privilege to “pri¬ 
 vacy.” American judicial discourse, for instance, makes the inward 
 and the private very suspicious allies of freedom. But 1 do not see 
 compelling reason to identify novelistic form and narrative discourse 
 with these categories or with the use of these categories in other dis¬ 
 courses; nor do 1 see compelling reason to dissociate novelistic form 
 and narrative from attempts to liberate us from public oppressions; 
 nor do 1 see family structure as necessarily—and in every possible 
 form—the ally of supervisory and disciplinary constraint. 
 
 My case relies on two contemporary novels of American homosexual 
 and bisexual life; The Talking Room by Marianne Hauser and The 
 Story of Harold by the pseudonymous Terry Andrews. If we think of 
 homosexual and bisexual persons as men and women who have fared 
 best under the shelter of inwardness and privacy, we will be surprised 
 by Hauser and Andrews. Their narratives argue that, both in and out 
 of storytelling, inwardness and privacy are inadequate housing. More 
 surprisingly, these narratives cultivate an ideal of family at the same 
 time as they subvert inwardness. Hauser’s and Andrews’s lesbians, 
 gays, and bisexuals dream of parenthood as well as of Eros. Their 
 stories feature philoprogenitiveness—nonsexual nurturing interest in 
 offspring and children—and figure sodomite mothers and fathers as 
 model parents. And why not? But we have also to ask why. If these 
 narratives subvert some suspect categories only to return to domes¬ 
 ticity and family, do they thereby collaborate homophobically with 
 the status quo? In Miller’s argument the family structure in Bleak 
 House nowhere belongs to itself, or to any form of life alternative 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 259 
 
 to the family’s “outside,” just as (apparently) Dickens’s narrative 
 does not belong to its own intention to counter the oppressive in¬ 
 stitutions it portrays. Do latter-day homosexual fictions, and homo¬ 
 sexuals themselves, after the heyday of Wilde’s, Gide’s, and Proust’s 
 heroic combat against family and society on behalf of the individual 
 and the inward, regress into the arms of the hegemonic Other by 
 seeking out a new version of “the practice of the family”? 
 
 To work through these questions we need a procedure supplemen¬ 
 tary—if not alternative—to Miller’s. Miller analyzes the relation of 
 novelistic discourse and representational practice to non-novelistic, 
 law-enforcing discourse and pragmatic practice. He does so by taking 
 the novel’s picture of the latter and the latter in fact as identical. One 
 reason why Miller can then posit the similarity between the “disci¬ 
 pline” of narrative novelistic order and the “discipline” of order out¬ 
 side the novelistic realm is that he does not compare side-by-side any 
 specimens of the two discourses. What are non-novelistic discourse 
 and practice really like: how exactly do they employ and enforce the 
 individual, the inward, the domestic, or whatever categories might 
 be under dispute, in comparison with the way fiction employs them? 
 Miller’s assumption is that separate realms of discourse and prac¬ 
 tice are only separate in appearance: that they are all the same in 
 actuality, because they are cut from the same ideological cloth. This 
 assumption is everywhere at work in ideological narrative poetics. 
 Eagleton, for example, ultimately undoes the pains he takes to dif¬ 
 ferentiate novelistic discourse from its ideological environment. On 
 the one hand, he distinguishes—as Miller does not—different kinds 
 of ideology (general, authorial, aesthetic) that layer a literary text. 
 The co-presence of these layers suggests more than an ideological 
 deadlock among them, or more than a deadlock between the literary 
 text and the general ideology it might oppose: “The text is a theatre 
 which doubles, prolongs, compacts and variegates its signs, shaking 
 them free from single determinants, merging and eliding them with 
 a freedom unknown to history”—and, 1 would add, with a freedom 
 unknown to the ideological practices and discourses of the law and 
 the police. But while Eagleton suggests that there is room to argue 
 that the literary text is either not overcome or not compromisingly 
 enabled by the text’s ideological “outside,” his argument tends ner- 
 
260 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 vously to bury the literary liberty it here and there invokes. In his 
 analyses of specific novelists, Eagleton continually appeals to the gen¬ 
 eral ideology that penetrates and makes tutelary this or that novel: 
 “Eliot’s fiction represents an attempt to integrate liberal ideology, in 
 both its Romantic and empiricist forms”; “What is in question with 
 all of those texts is the .. . over-determined character of their mode of 
 insertion into the hegemonic ideological forms”; “The need for value, 
 and the recognition of its utter vacuity: it is here that . . . Conrad’s 
 enterprise, . . . integral to the imperialist ideology he shared, stands 
 revealed”; and so on.® Yet these instances of general ideology are 
 always gestured to, and never concretely exemplified, so that one 
 never comes to compare a practical and specific instance of general 
 ideology with a fictional instance. The argument goes on in a realm 
 of assumption and innuendo about the literary text’s environment. It 
 goes on thus about texts and “general ideologies” that are a century 
 old and that are—for Americans—at a vast cultural remove. Whether 
 or not novelists provide shelter or housing for censured experiences, 
 discourses, and practices which are reinventions—in the very process 
 of representation—of the censuring agency is a question that needs to 
 be engaged with more empirical specificity than ideological narrative 
 poetics has yet exemplified. 
 
 Unfortunately for our lives, but relevantly to my purpose, the 1986 
 Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick furnishes an instance 
 of general ideology in nonfictional, non-narrative or (at least) anti¬ 
 narrative discourse, of both a judicial and policing kind. And the 
 decision deploys the categories of inwardness, individuality, and fa¬ 
 milial domesticity in a way that affects all our stories. Since the cate¬ 
 gories at issue in Hardwick are the categories at issue for ideological 
 narrative poetics, we can best measure what I would call the “liberty 
 interests” of Hauser’s and Andrews’s narratives if we look first at the 
 Court’s majority and minority opinions. 
 
 By now the Hardwick decision is well known. Upholding the bi¬ 
 zarre arrest of a Georgia citizen, Michael Hardwick, in his own 
 bedroom, while he was performing private consensual sodomy with 
 another man, the Court sanctioned a state’s constitutional right to 
 make and enforce antisodomy laws in relation to private, consensual, 
 adult sexual relations. Currently twenty-five states and the District 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 261 
 
 of Columbia have such laws. Because in 1961 all fifty states had them, 
 we might surmise that the Court is worried about an erosion of moral 
 standards implied by the declining number of these statutes. Hardwick 
 shows that the Court is certainly concerned by the declining num¬ 
 ber of states willing to criminalize adult homosexuals for commit¬ 
 ting sodomy in consensual privacy. The Georgia antisodomy statute, 
 dating from 1968, broadened the wording of earlier statutes, so that 
 the definition of sodomy would not discriminate against either gender 
 or against any combination of genders. For as of 1968 Georgia defines 
 sodomy as “performance of or submission to any sex act involving the 
 sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another.” (Follow¬ 
 ing Georgia’s lead, this is my definition of sodomy throughout this 
 essay.) But the Supreme Court ruling interprets the statute as primar¬ 
 ily directed against private, consensual, adult homosexual relations, 
 and the Court justifies discriminatory application of antisodomy stat¬ 
 utes against these homosexual relations, rather than even-handed 
 application to heterosexual and homosexual acts alike. 
 
 In the opinions justifying and opposing the Hardwick decision, 
 the Court’s sides pit the categories of the domestic and the private- 
 individual against each other, and each side seeks to subordinate 
 one category to the other. Thus Justice White’s majority opinion 
 claims that the Court’s prior libertarian rulings about private con¬ 
 sensual sexual conduct are rulings (including Roe v. Wade) that pro¬ 
 tect “family, marriage or procreation” from state interference. Hence 
 adult homosexuals do not have a right to practice consensual sodomy 
 in private, because “no connection between family, marriage or pro¬ 
 creation on the one hand and homosexual activity on the other has 
 been demonstrated.”^ To this emphasis on family, marriage, or pro¬ 
 creation Justice Blackmun and the Court minority oppose the liberty 
 interests of privacy and the individual. But while the decency of the 
 dissenting arguments are a black-and-white contrast to the meanness 
 of Justice White’s, there is something unsettling in the strategies of 
 argument on both sides. 
 
 What is unsettling is that both sides cannot permit to homosexuals 
 a space of appearance in the public realm. While the Court ma¬ 
 jority justifies supervising—and even eliminating—homosexual pri¬ 
 vacy, and while the Court minority defends homosexual privacy. 
 
262 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 both sides agree that homosexuality is only a private matter. This ex¬ 
 clusive identification of homosexuality with privacy guarantees that 
 the judges, at their worst, will equate homosexuality exclusively 
 with sodomite sexual intimacies (how could it be anything else, ex¬ 
 cept perhaps acts of sodomy outrageously performed in public?); and, 
 at their best, with emotional intimacies relevant only to the private 
 sphere. Hence for both sides homosexuality has no public, no politi¬ 
 cal, existence. Although Justice Blackmun makes an attempt to allow 
 homosexuality a public place, his argument is weak, perhaps because 
 half-hearted. So the arguments of both sides of the Court maintain a 
 long ideological tradition: that homosexual life, whether supervised 
 or not, is and should be a closeted life. 
 
 The White side of the Court’s strategy is to make homosexuality 
 more and more closeted, by insisting that—after all—the constitu¬ 
 tional right to privacy is not a right in and of itself, but that it is a 
 right determined by the measure of its public consequences. At least 
 something like this reasoning seems to motivate White’s bland sar¬ 
 casm about there being “no connection’’ between homosexuality and 
 family, marriage, or procreation. White brings forward Griswold v. 
 Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird, both cases about the right to 
 practice contraception, along with Roe v. Wade, in order to suggest 
 that they are not just defenses of doing as one likes in the name of 
 the right to privacy. Rather, because these cases are connected with 
 family matters. White sees them in the light of public issues. The 
 family, his reasoning implies, is not just a private matter, but a half¬ 
 way house between an individual’s privacy and his public life as a 
 citizen. Accordingly, private rights protect family rights, and family 
 rights protect public rights. This connection between family and pub¬ 
 lic categories, which lets go of privacy “in itself” is, as we shall 
 see, shared with the sodomites represented by Hauser and Andrews. 
 They too see the family as a Janus-like thing, at once private and 
 public. Together, White and the sodomites suggest that parenthood 
 makes the parent a less private, more public self, because the par¬ 
 ent becomes the child’s mediator vis-a-vis the public culture. But 
 whereas the sodomites, given this line of thought, pursue homosexual 
 philoprogenitiveness partly as an entry into the public realm. Justice 
 White would block the pursuit by insuring an absence of connec- 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 263 
 
 tion between family and homosexuality. The individual, the inward, 
 and the domestic belong to the public realm here, but homosexual 
 inwardness does not. For White, the sodomite is thoroughly private 
 —indeed so removed from and detrimental to public life that he has 
 no right to be either public or private. 
 
 Justice Blackmun also believes that private rights belong to public 
 issues: it is for this reason that he registers his and his colleagues’ 
 dissent from the majority. But with a curious inverted symmetry to 
 White’s arguments, Blackmun’s defense of homosexual conduct at¬ 
 tenuates the public and political place of homosexuality even as it 
 tries not to. White suggests that Roe v. Wade supports public matters 
 and values more than it does private rights: in reaction, Blackmun 
 reasserts privacy, individuality, and inwardness. These were the cate¬ 
 gories operative, Blackmun says, in the abortion ruling. “We protect 
 the decision whether to have a child because parenthood alters so 
 dramatically an individual’s self-definition.” We can see the relevance 
 of Blackmun’s point to Roe v. Wade, but this is an odd way of defining 
 what parenthood alters. Parenthood, it seems to me, abolishes the 
 parent’s self. Insofar as parenthood is antithetical to self, it is odd to 
 see Blackmun suggest that parenthood is unqualifiedly subordinated 
 to self-definition. It is by this elevation of the individual self as the 
 darling of all rights that Blackmun comes to attenuate the public im¬ 
 pact of private adult sexual consents, even at the moment when he 
 praises that impact. He quotes the following sentence from a 1943 
 decision: “The test of the [freedom to differ] is the right to differ 
 as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.” He follows 
 the quotation with this comment: “it is precisely because the issue 
 [of private choice] raised [by Bowers v. Hardwick] makes individuals 
 what they are that we should be especially sensitive to the rights 
 of those whose choices upset the majority.”® Thus, moving from the 
 quotation to his commentary, the justice takes the phrase “touch 
 the heart of the existing order” and rewrites it: “touches the heart 
 of what makes individuals what they are.” This revision makes the 
 existing order an aggregate of private individuals: but we know that 
 the existing order is a network of relations that, really, universally, 
 stops nowhere. If the heart of this network can be touched, it is be¬ 
 cause private choices have public issue. But where homosexuality is 
 
264 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 concerned, the opposing sides of the Court in effect join hands in 
 withdrawing homosexuality from the realm of the public. 
 
 To heterosexuals, whose command of public space is underwritten 
 and assured by their sexual desire, privacy is a dear refuge from the 
 omnipresence of inalienable community. To homosexuals, privacy is 
 a dear refuge from oppression by the public—and is also a guarantee 
 of “liberation” from public consequence. Due to their exclusion from 
 appearance in public in any but a nominal sense, homosexuals and 
 bisexuals have always had the private closet—and its scared, squalid 
 freedom—for their status quo. Accordingly, we can see how in the 
 Court’s discourse the categories of the individual, the inward, and 
 the domestic can be used—for libertarian ends!—to justify repres¬ 
 sive and oppressive business as usual. What 1 fear to be the logic of 
 Blackmun’s position, no less than White’s, is illustrated by a Decem¬ 
 ber 1987 AP story about Congressman Jack Kemp in the Salt Lake 
 Tribune. The five-column headline about the then-presidential can¬ 
 didate reads: “Gays Have Rights, But Teaching Isn’t One of Them.” In 
 the story Kemp explains his point, in a way that conveys the upshot 
 of both Blackmun’s and White’s arguments: “We want all Americans 
 to enjoy the right to privacy and we have to at the same time recog¬ 
 nize that there have to be public standards.” Presumably Kemp thinks 
 —insofar as a member of the party of Jesse Helms can—that teach¬ 
 ing, besides being a mere job, is a form of parenting, that it transmits 
 culture via shaping personal influence, no matter how disinterested 
 and professional the transmission. And I would agree with him. But 
 apparently public standards, and the space of appearance we call the 
 public, cannot tolerate or benefit from cultural philoprogenitiveness 
 in nonheterosexuals. It does seem true, then, as Kemp’s neat division 
 of private and public shows, that the privilege—the legalized right 
 —given by American ideology in the name of privacy to the cate¬ 
 gories of individuality and inwardness can co-opt the liberty they 
 supposedly serve. 
 
 Of course, it might well be asked who would dispense with the right 
 to privacy even if it is oppressively entangled. Have the women who 
 benefited from Roe v. Wade (pace Byron White’s understanding of it) 
 been oppressed by the benefit? And AIDS victims would be more in¬ 
 different than astonished or even interested to learn that the privacy 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 265 
 
 they depend on to protect them against punitive supervision is, after 
 all, enabled by privacy’s radical entanglement with the police or the 
 judiciary. Yet it must be admitted that the all-suspecting method of 
 ideological narrative poetics is well suited to reading Supreme Court 
 discourse—even though this is to admit that the ideological study of 
 fictional narrative is most fruitful when, oddly enough, it is applied 
 elsewhere—to non-narratives or to antinarrative discourses that are 
 not novelistic or fictional. 
 
 1 should like to apply it once more to nonfiction before turning to 
 Hauser’s and Andrews’s sodomite tales. Hardwick has already created 
 double binds, indeed a discursive pathos, in judicial attempts to shift 
 legal response to homosexuality away from a focus on privacy. But 
 whether or not the shift can be achieved remains a doubtful question 
 —in spite of a recently victorious attempt to do so. This attempt to 
 wring out of the Constitution a place in public life for homosexuals 
 is the majority decision written in February 1988 by Judge William 
 Norris, of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Watkins v. United 
 States Army. In 1981 the Army issued new regulations disqualifying 
 all homosexuals from all ranks, regardless of length or quality of 
 service. So Perry Watkins, who had admitted to being homosexual 
 when in 1967 the Army inducted him, and who had accumulated 
 an exemplary service record, was told in 1981 that he would not be 
 allowed to reenlist, and was remanded to the private sphere. Judge 
 Norris declares in the decision of this case that the United States 
 Army’s ban on homosexual acts for all Army personnel is unconsti¬ 
 tutional, not because it violates the homosexual’s right to privacy or 
 bans same-sex sodomy, but because it discriminates against homo¬ 
 sexuals due to their orientation rather than their acts. By reason of 
 such discrimination the Army violates the rights homosexuals have 
 to equal protection under the law, since the alternative sexual orien¬ 
 tation is not allowed to be discriminated against. Moreover, Norris 
 asserts that homosexuals must be considered as a suspect class, as a 
 disfavored group that is the victim of unjustified antipathy. As a sus¬ 
 pect class, homosexuals must be protected by the judicial process— 
 by a more than usually rigorous and judicial scrutiny of the motives 
 of those who allege grievances against them. Norris finds the Army’s 
 grievances in this case to be unjustifiable. 
 
266 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 In defending his majority decision. Judge Norris argues like a bril¬ 
 liant law student who brings a desperate youthful ingenuity to bear 
 on the harm done to a just cause by legal precedent. I say desper¬ 
 ate ingenuity because the precedential aspect of Hardwick surrounds 
 Watkins like a brick wall, which Norris can only knock his head 
 against—until by sheer cunning he knocks the wall down. He argues 
 that the Supreme Court considered Hardwick in relation to substan¬ 
 tive due process, and not primarily in relation to equal protection 
 under the law; and that, insofar as the Hardwick majority did touch 
 on equal protection, it did so by emphasizing “the fundamental rights 
 branch” of the latter.^ Hence Hardwick left untouched and still un¬ 
 argued the relation of gay rights to other branches of equal pro¬ 
 tection doctrine, including suspect class analysis. Moreover, Norris 
 says that Hardwick backed up the states’ right to legislate against 
 sexual actions committed by every orientation, but that it did not 
 condemn any specific orientation. Putting this claim together with a 
 reductio ad absurdum of the Army’s sexual prohibitions (the judge 
 shows that the Army exonerates homosexual acts engaged in by men 
 who are intoxicated, or curious, or coerced, and who won’t per¬ 
 form such acts again; hence the prohibition discriminates against de¬ 
 sire and orientation, not acts), Norris explains that Hardwick doesn’t 
 apply to Watkins, who never pleads that the right to privacy ex¬ 
 tends to homosexual sodomy. In this way Norris not only argues his 
 way around Hardwick, but both condones and avoids some recent 
 Ninth Circuit decisions—including one by new Supreme Court Jus¬ 
 tice Kennedy—upholding the Army’s regulations against homosexual 
 conduct (rather than against homosexual orientation). 
 
 But if the Supreme Court gets—or takes—the chance to review 
 Watkins, I’ll predict that Norris’s courageous argument will not with¬ 
 stand the Court’s precedent. In spite of the public life Norris tries to 
 insure for Perry Watkins and for homosexuals in general, the way in 
 which the Hardwick opinions, pro and con, make the right to pri¬ 
 vacy the be-all and end-all of discussion might yet destroy Norris’s 
 attempt. The dissenting judge in Watkins, Stephen Reinhardt, makes a 
 breast-beating show about what he believes—as a private individual, 
 in all inwardness—is wrong with Hardwick. The case has “egregiously 
 misinterpreted the Constitution”; moreover, the Army regulations 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 267 
 
 against homosexuals are “unfair and discriminatory.” But, in spite of 
 these private opinions, Reinhardt cannot join with Norris because of 
 Reinhardt’s duty to apply Supreme Court precedent. This duty leads 
 Reinhardt not only to reassert precedent but also to characterize 
 Norris’s arguments as illogical and incredible. Reinhardt argues that 
 Norris’s distinction between suspect class and fundamental rights 
 “branches” of equal protection analysis is factitious. And then he 
 points out that homosexuality is sodomy, that homosexuality can 
 mean nothing but sodomite action. Indeed, he instructs his colleagues 
 on what homosexuals must do: “oral sex is the primary form of homo¬ 
 sexual activity.” Since homosexuality equals sodomy in his view, 
 then Hardwick has made homosexuals—in twenty-five states and 
 in the District of Columbia, at least—a criminal class, and crimi¬ 
 nal classification forecloses suspect class analysis. Most of all, it 
 turns out, Reinhardt is worried that Norris’s argument would abridge 
 heterosexual rights to sexual privacy. The straight right to privacy, 
 in other words, is the key to Reinhardt’s pathos-burdened duty to en¬ 
 force Hardwick. Norris’s decision promotes “a serious retreat in the 
 privacy area” for it suggests that, like homosexual sodomy, "hetero¬ 
 sexual sodomy, including oral sex between married couples, is not 
 protected by the right to privacy and may be criminalized.” But for 
 Reinhardt the fact that Hardwick singles out homosexual sodomy 
 as its target, even though the Georgia statute does not, proves that 
 heterosexual sodomy is protected—by the privacy right in the Con¬ 
 stitution. Reinhardt here asserts his credo: “I believe the Constitution 
 protects most, if not all, private heterosexual acts between consent¬ 
 ing adults.” Norris would make such protection questionable—and 
 so Reinhardt, in the name of Hardwick, finds it his duty to sacri¬ 
 fice homosexual privacy and homosexual public status to the Con¬ 
 stitution, which, it now appears, speaks a definitively heterosexual 
 discourse. 
 
 It does not take much distance from these debates to sense that 
 the obsessive attention to privacy is not all that is wrong with them. 
 The judicial discourse itself is impaired by its earnest ever-straitened 
 logic, by a constant operation within it of limitations and discrimi¬ 
 nations. In fact, Norris’s defense of Watkins’s sexual actions seems 
 another form of constraint: love the sinner but discriminate against 
 
268 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 the sin. The judicial discourse nefariously polices the liberties it 
 means to serve. It does this by repressing its own potential to become 
 narrative—by opposing antinarrative generalizations and discursive 
 discriminations to the stories the judicial discourse seeks to rule. But 
 if this discourse were a fully, openly narrative one, it would not suf¬ 
 fer a deadlocking self-constraint. The liberty interest of narrative lies 
 in its freedom to license any connection that crosses its path. Fic¬ 
 tional narrative never runs a straight course. And a narrative bent 
 for crookedness of relation makes the meaning of a narrative a law 
 unto itself, antinomian in comparison to this or that general law—-or 
 general ideology. In regard to general law—including the general law 
 of structure we believe rules the constitution of fictional narratives 
 —even the saddest stories maintain a facetiousness, a kind of comic 
 deviancy, in the face of regulation. 
 
 It is a sign of the self-constraint and of the antinarrative nature 
 of the legal discourses I have surveyed that they appear to be inca¬ 
 pable of anything but deadly earnest. In Norris an argumentations 
 glee plays through the footnotes, subordinated there as a sign of all 
 the stories the law cannot tell or make sense of. Byron White con¬ 
 demns the pleas on behalf of Michael Hardwick as “facetious,” but he 
 sees nothing of the facetious relations in which a novelist’s or story¬ 
 teller’s version of White against Blackmun would involve him. He 
 tells us that private adult consensual homosexuality is a “victimless 
 crime, such as the possession and use of illegal drugs”: that to protect 
 it against prosecution would be tantamount to protecting “adultery, 
 incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in 
 the home.” And so “we are unwilling to start down that road,” as 
 the justice named Byron puts it, butchly avoiding the garden path his 
 culture has gone down—not always to its harm—since the days of the 
 justice’s namesake. The very names in this discourse suggest a story 
 that would stand the discourse on its head. When Justice Blackmun 
 backs up his opposition to White he appeals to Loving v. Virginia, the 
 case which—only twenty years ago—struck down state laws against 
 mixed racial marriages. “The parallel,” Blackmun writes, “between 
 Loving and this case is almost uncanny,” because Virginia used many 
 of White’s general arguments in Hardwick to defend antimiscegena¬ 
 tion statutes." (The parallel might be more uncanny if Richard Perry 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 269 
 
 Loving had been a black man, given the name of the judge who enlists 
 him against White to suggest a tie between interdicted black-and- 
 white love and interdicted sodomite loving.) But legal discourse can¬ 
 not seem to make these analogies among cases have the impact narra¬ 
 tives can make them have, because narratives can easily tie together 
 what the judge must leave in a discriminated state. Judge Reinhardt 
 objects to judge Norris’s drawing parallel relations between sodom¬ 
 ites and blacks. True, he says “history will view Hardwick much as it 
 views Plessy v. Ferguson”: but at the next moment he says that “no 
 matter how appealing the analogy between [treatment of blacks and 
 homosexuals] may be, we are not free to draw it. . . . Cases regarding 
 blacks are simply irrelevant.”'^ A narrative of Watkins, not so dis¬ 
 criminating, would probably treat the fact that the plaintiff sergeant 
 is a black man as no less relevant to his story than his homosexuality. 
 Unable to permit or to make relations in the way live relations permit 
 or make themselves, judicial discourse exhibits its self-imprisoning 
 difference from narrative. 
 
 At first sight Hauser’s novel gives us pause, and does not bode well 
 for narrative’s liberty interests. The Talking Room practices a high 
 modern or high postmodern formalism that turns the text in on itself, 
 as if to assert the text’s artistic right to privacy, its right to shelter 
 from the public altogether. Does the novel’s farcical formal donnee 
 not amount to reactionary ideological significance? As if instantly to 
 satirize the love that will not speak its name, Hauser’s story about 
 lesbians and the child of one of them uses no names, only initials. B, 
 a pregnant minor of thirteen and the novel’s narrator, is the child of 
 an unknown sire and of], a lesbian. J’s female lover, V, engineered 
 J’s pregnancy to shore up her relationship with J. As the domestic 
 and familial relation unfolds, other initials move in and out of the 
 drama. And since all of them are treated by the text with a consis¬ 
 tent toughness, perhaps Hauser’s pack of initials is only an alphabetic 
 arrangement of loathing: a loathing that surfaces when V’s mother, 
 granny-anny, discovers that her daughter is a lesbian and performs 
 naked a ritual dance of contempt, during which she invites V and 
 her lesbian cohorts to kiss granny’s ass. We find ourselves right where 
 
270 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 suspicious critics like Miller would lead us: to the possibility that 
 granny-anny is the novelist, expressing contempt for sapphists who 
 will not produce children via the acceptable channels. 
 
 But the novel’s formalism is richer in relations than this suspicious 
 accounting can tell. To begin with, in response to the suspicion that 
 the formalism is a figure for privacy or inwardness, the treatment of 
 the characters as initials immediately undoes the category of the in¬ 
 dividual. Not taken for granted, individuals here are only relational 
 units. Their relations stop nowhere, and this narrative—I would say, 
 like fictional narratives generally—cares for individuals only in order 
 to exhibit their promiscuous interconnections. Hauser directs us as 
 to how to use her formalism on the novel’s first page. Installed above 
 what she calls “the talking room,” B, the minor-narrator who is preg¬ 
 nant, needs always to listen in, to overhear what is below, and so 
 must the reader, to whom the novel’s formal elements are offered 
 as sounding boards or transmitters for what at first does not meet 
 the ear. Granny-anny hears about V’s lesbianism through her loathed 
 hearing aid; the news prompts her to destroy the instrument, and 
 her dance of contempt is a deaf one. The Talking Room does not con¬ 
 done deafness. The formal dance of its elements transmits a subtext, 
 but we have to turn up our hearing aids to hear it—unless we want 
 spitefully to play deaf. 
 
 What sounds or resounds below the normal level of audition is a 
 transformation of the category of the domestic. It is a transformation 
 that equates domesticity and family structure with the sodomite. To 
 get her reader to hear this transformation Hauser puts the reader in¬ 
 side a peculiar situational pun. Eliciting a heightened aural response 
 to talk, Hauser silently equates the aural and the oral. Demanding 
 that we put ourselves aurally as close as possible to the vent of the 
 text’s significance, Hauser submits us subliminally to a writer’s and 
 reader’s form of sodomite play. This play is appropriately at once sod¬ 
 omite and sublimated, because subaurally the text transmits the cen¬ 
 trality of J’s lesbian motherhood. Criticized though she is, J is the one 
 figure in the text from whom Hauser does not withdraw the reader’s 
 approval. That approval is withdrawn from V, J’s lover, because V 
 enacts the female-oppressing role of a man in a woman’s body; it is 
 withdrawn from B, because B’s ravening heterosexuality is a blunder- 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 271 
 
 ing attempt at identification with her mother; it is withdrawn from 
 D, a gay man who dreams of liberating J from V and of being himself 
 a mother, but who is too busy cruising to do more than dream. But 
 perhaps it is D who makes the most significant comment in the novel, 
 when he asks: “When [a little girl] plays mother [to her doll] where is 
 the father? Absent most of the time or never invented.” ’’ Since B feels 
 passionate toward D at the same time as she becomes pregnant by a 
 boy named Ollie we can hear in her situation a girl playing mother to 
 her dolly. Hauser’s play with dolly makes the men absent or never in¬ 
 vented, and makes the mother-figure nongenital. But Hauser’s game 
 has an earnest object: to transform the figure of the biological genital- 
 centered mother of us all into an alternative figure of the cultural 
 mother, a figure in whom sit side by side philoprogenitiveness and 
 sodomite crime. And one further situational pun in Hauser’s nar¬ 
 rative must be noted. B’s loving identification with J, the sodomite 
 mother, invites the reader to read J and B, the minor mother-to-be, 
 as interchangeable. We thereby see a minor-as-mother become a type 
 for a minority motherhood, a type which is being presented perhaps 
 as still premature for the bearing of culture. Yet this desire that the 
 sodomite lesbian be the cultural mother is, according to the novel, as 
 old as girls playing with dolls. This equivalence of the most new and 
 the most ancient desire suggests, through the sounding board of B’s 
 pregnancy, that the heterosexual family is still in its minority. And 
 since Hauser conjoins the girl-narrator B with heterosexuality and 
 minority, B’s love for her sodomite mother J transmits the idea that 
 there is no difference between sexual majority and minority longings. 
 They both share homosexual and sodomite inclinations, and these 
 inclinations, sublimated, are the root of nurture. 
 
 What 1 see is that The Talking Room reduces the individual to an 
 alphabetic sign, and that the novel transgresses a legally and cultur¬ 
 ally constructed opposition between domestic nurture and sodomy; 
 what 1 cannot see is that Hauser’s narrative mode of reformism makes 
 better sense as an undeclared defense of the status quo. If Hauser 
 uses the form of her work to maintain for it a certain privacy of 
 meaning, this is to forestall an appropriation of the novel’s scarcely 
 audible ideology by an already publicly established one. We must 
 hear the difference between the majority and the minority versions 
 
272 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 of motherhood. The majority version insists that authoritative ma¬ 
 ternity is heterosexually genital, inalienably biological. But the mi¬ 
 nority version puts us in mind of what persons of heterosexual geni- 
 tality might want to forget: that every child depends for nurture, and 
 for an entry into culture, upon the displacement of the sexuality by 
 which the child has been biologically engendered. Within the sphere 
 of that displacement, homosexuality is relatively closer to culture 
 than to nature. If the sodomite parenting which is the cynosure of 
 The Talking Room were to become a public possibility, the family 
 heart of the state would be transformed. The more nurture might 
 be removed from biological origins, the more philoprogenitiveness 
 might be assured, since parenting would become increasingly a mat¬ 
 ter of choice. It is because the sodomite parent threatens the present 
 allegedly natural and spontaneous constitution of domesticity that 
 lesbians or homosexuals or bisexuals who seek to foster or adopt chil¬ 
 dren and who present themselves openly to the appropriate agencies 
 do not find themselves welcomed. Only three years ago, presidential 
 candidate Governor Dukakis forcibly withdrew a child from a male 
 couple in Boston publicly licensed to foster him; the Governor de¬ 
 clared the licensing a mistake. Not surprisingly, Dukakis continues 
 to insist that heterosexuals make better foster parents than homo¬ 
 sexuals—and maintains that were he to become president he would 
 not issue an executive order banning discrimination on grounds of 
 sexual preference.*'’ 
 
 But of course it will be said (and, at this point, no doubt it will 
 be said impatiently) that it is on account of the threat to the wel¬ 
 fare of children, and not on account of any other threat, that homo¬ 
 sexual parenting ought to be questioned. Allow me to postpone this 
 important consideration, albeit second to no other, for yet a while. 
 Hauser’s elevation of the sodomite mother is enabled by her absence 
 of piety about parenting. This absence made me note at first the 
 novel’s apparent hostility toward its agents—an appearance which 
 needs a final reconsideration. Hauser’s B, momentarily on the run 
 from the lesbian grown-ups who are weekending at granny-anny’s, 
 describes “the back of the house which juts out broad and bare like 
 granny-anny’s when she . . . told them in Croatian to kiss it.” Then 
 she reflects: “I run away from home, each time for ever. For ever is 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 273 
 
 never, each time I stumble over the same looped root and the same 
 fallen bird nest.”’* The house—domesticity—is a sign of contempt 
 for outsiders; it is also the sign of entrapment. Is this designation 
 of domesticity—even of domesticity presided over by sodomy—not a 
 counterexpression of contempt for households? In the i8 April 1988 
 issue of New York magazine, devoted to “How We Live Now,” a gay 
 man interviewed by the journal is designated the representative of 
 current mores. He is certainly averse to households. He objects to the 
 present AlDS-related trend toward homosexual domesticity—“Some¬ 
 times they’ll adopt a kid. They’ll work on their relationship. ... I’m 
 not sure that’s the ultimate answer for a fully evolved gay person— 
 imitating the straight world.” The interviewee, varying B’s formula 
 for entrapment, seems to have the hang of the narrative ideologists’ 
 method. But the same speaker is also an energetic political activist 
 —and given the history of homosexuality’s retreat into privacy, we 
 can say that his activism imitates the straight world’s traditions, its 
 commitment to the public dimension of life. The house that appears 
 to be inescapable now, for heterosexual or homosexual, for parent or 
 child, is the public sphere. The return to this house, bleak though it 
 be, is politically inevitable. 
 
 Hauser uses as a leitmotif in The Talking Room the story of a con¬ 
 vict who is so hungry for liberty that, having the key to his cell door 
 for his escape, he can’t resist swallowing it, and dies with the key in 
 his stomach. We could read this as a parable of many things—among 
 them, of homosexuality’s having swallowed the key to liberty by its 
 craving for privacy as the medium “for a fully evolved gay person,” 
 as a liberation from politics altogether. But a better liberty might lie 
 only in public politics, and only through the public sphere’s halfway 
 house, domesticity. To be sure, all the desires—for domesticity or 
 for whatever—represented in this novel are modeled on the ravening 
 hunger for the key to liberty that is a forever unfulhlled privation. 
 Hauser’s toughness comes from knowing that neither the sodomite 
 mother nor her children nor their lovers can bring this ravening to a 
 satisfied stop. But in this regard one aspect of J’s lover V, B’s self-styled 
 “aunt,” must be read also in a parabolical way. V is a real-estate 
 agent who houses her “practice of the family” in a Greenwich Village 
 building, close to a vantage point on the Statue of Liberty. Next door 
 
274 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 to the house is a dilapidated site V also owns, and means to restore. 
 Is this neighboring site the traditional heterosexual domestic realm? 
 Although V means to renovate this other house, she continually pro¬ 
 crastinates. Perhaps this is because she secretly remains committed 
 to the heterosexual domesticity of the site. Yet V does all her work 
 for J and for the minor-mother. Hauser’s novel opposes two radi¬ 
 cally different domesticities to each other, and one would be hard- 
 pressed to assert that the opposition ends in deadlock. Given V’s 
 objects of devotion, renovation work is under way, transforming the 
 possession of conventional heterosexual housing into the disposses¬ 
 sion of what is conventional. Under the ascendancy of the sodomite 
 mother, the heterosexual site is and remains ruined, at least insofar 
 as the heterosexual no longer has property rights on the engendering 
 and the nurturing of the future. 
 
 In Andrews’s book the renovation of the heterosexual household 
 uses a narrative form that is more traditional than Hauser’s. The 
 Story of Harold is the title of a popular children’s storybook written 
 by the novel’s protagonist, one Terry Andrews. Just as the novel’s 
 pseudonymous author (whom I shall refer to as Andrews) is made 
 indistinguishable from the novel’s protagonist (whom I shall refer 
 to as Terry), so the storybook within the story is indistinguishable 
 from the novel itself. Indeed the story of Terry’s invented character 
 Harold turns into an elaborate nest of tales, in which Terry’s friends 
 and lovers are dramatized by an array of fictions-within-fictions that 
 fills the novel with self-reflexive play. Accordingly, the novel is per¬ 
 fectly traditional—even Dickensian—in its dedication to elaborate 
 plottings: and it is at the same time perfectly modern or postmodern 
 in the way it foregrounds narrative procedures, as if to meditate meta- 
 critically on storytelling. The conventional-traditional—in terms of 
 story and family both—and the subversion of the traditional are side 
 by side here. But the juxtaposition is not the sign of a deadlock be¬ 
 tween the two sides. 
 
 Story and narrative are portrayed by Andrews as crucially helping 
 children to live, to get them through the perilous long time in which 
 biology makes them wait for maturity. Narrative is thus given a par¬ 
 ental nurturing role. “Not enough of the light from the idea of life has 
 reached me,” the narrator says in a despairing moment.'* Narrative in 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 275 
 
 the novel is this light from the idea of life. But The Story of Harold 
 assigns the origin and operation of this nurturing idea to sources 
 that are suspect (at least to the legal and civic police). Whereas 
 Hauser figures her narrative as a play on oral sodomy, Andrews fig¬ 
 ures his as a play on anality, and of anality—although the figuration 
 comprehends cunnilingus as well. Indeed the perversity of Andrews’s 
 narrator and storyteller knows few bounds. Emphatically of the pre- 
 AIDS era, Terry carries on three simultaneous love affairs: one with 
 a widow and mother, one with a married male surgeon who is the 
 father of several children, and one with a single male social worker. 
 The affairs with the men are confusedly sadomasochistic, which 
 is partly the result of Terry’s being more in love with the surgeon 
 than with the others. Since this love is not equally returned, it is 
 aggression-filled and desperate, and leads Terry into a suicide-murder 
 pact with his other male lover, who has arranged a slave’s masoch¬ 
 istic love-death at the hands of his woeful master. But in the course 
 of the novel the suicidal and murderous elements in the narrator are 
 reversed, and he is freed from them. 
 
 The agency of the reversal is narrative. Although Terry is a pro¬ 
 fessional writer of children’s books, he appears to write so that he 
 can keep children and his own childishness at a distance. This dis¬ 
 tance collapses when he is asked to help Barney, a friend’s depressed 
 seven-year-old. Terry undertakes to stimulate Barney by a chain of 
 stories which allegorize his and Barney’s reluctance to live. Along 
 with Barney’s terrors, all Terry’s crimes against nature—appropri¬ 
 ately disguised—enter into the fabulous narratives which come to 
 overtake the novel. But it is this overtaking of reality by the nar¬ 
 ratives whose source is sexually illicit that in the end helps Terry 
 and the child to come back to life. This happens, for one thing, be¬ 
 cause of the way the narratives disrupt the category of the individual. 
 Terry becomes the sodomite cultural father, the male equivalent of 
 Hauser’s], by the way his stories bridge the gap between the private 
 and the public, and bring to Terry’s closet for the first time a realm 
 of public consequence. In fact the problem for Terry and Barney is 
 that they experience the biological family as a purely private struc¬ 
 ture, hence as a deprivation of more extended and more vital cultural 
 relations. The suicidal depression felt by both the man and the child 
 
276 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 results when they experience a loss of biological parents that has no 
 compensation in the public cultural realm. In the American scene 
 as Andrews portrays it there is no public: instead there is only an 
 intense arena of private, mostly sexual interests. Here heterosexual 
 biological parenthood creates privacy as a deprivation of public re¬ 
 lation and consequence. In fostering and in effect adopting Barney, 
 Terry links biological nurture to cultural nurture. He heartens the 
 child—and heartens himself—because his stories invent and reveal a 
 world that even in its familial dimension is no longer purely private 
 or dedicated to privacy. In Andrews it is the family’s jealous dedica¬ 
 tion to privacy that sickens children, for it gives them only biological 
 family relations in which to live. 
 
 But it must be stressed that this entry into the public realm through 
 the novel’s interidentity of parenthood and narrative does not inte¬ 
 grate or unify the individuality of Terry or of the child. The emphases 
 on individuality and inward privacy in the Supreme Court’s rights 
 discourse would not be confirmed by Andrews’s novel. The Story of 
 Harold dramatizes not what Justice Blackmun would call the single 
 decisional private self but the variety of selves which make up Terry 
 and Barney, and life in general. Narrative can intervene in existing 
 affairs because of the persistent open-ended and divided nature (both 
 public and private) of personal identity and of the status quo. 
 
 But how is this creative intervention by fictional narrative equated 
 in Andrews with anality and with a sodomite relation to the anus? 
 This question needs answering before we can see how narratives aris¬ 
 ing from such a source can be related to philoprogenitiveness, and can 
 escape representing the forces that repress these relations. Terry’s 
 stories to Barney are all oral narratives: they are therefore curi¬ 
 ously related to Terry’s romance with the widowed mother, Anne, 
 since his sexual gratification of her is primarily cunnilingal. In this 
 way Terry’s storytelling mode is brought close to sodomy and ma¬ 
 ternity—his oral talent seems to have a clitoral and vaginal inspi¬ 
 ration. But the content of Terry’s stories—which, since it is for a 
 child’s hearing, displaces and desexualizes whatever sexual sources 
 it has—derives largely from his male relations. And these relations 
 are anus-centered. What Andrews leads us to make of this anality 
 has a special force in turning aside the charge that novels produce 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 277 
 
 and take for granted (“all along” their history) a sheltered, private 
 space. Andrews is disrupting the most private of our bodily spaces 
 and making narrative the agent of the disruption. 
 
 To explain Andrews’s strategy I need to make use of Guy Hocqueng- 
 hem’s Homosexual Desire, published in France in 1972, and so a part 
 of the era and ethos of The Story of Harold. Attempting to develop a 
 theory of homosexual anal eroticism, Hocquenghem speculates that 
 “ours is a phallic society,” ruled by a “despotic signifier,” the fetish- 
 ized and sublimated penis. As a result, a structural social opposition 
 between public and private realms founds itself on a kind of struc¬ 
 tural social mapping of male bodies. “Every man possesses a phallus 
 which guarantees him a social role; every man has an anus which is 
 truly his own, in the most secret depths of his own person.” The au¬ 
 tocracy of the phallus makes the phallus “essentially social,” whereas 
 in contrast “the anus has no social position except sublimation. The 
 functions of this organ are truly private: they are the site of the 
 formation of the person. The anus expresses privatisation itself”: it 
 is “overinvested individually because its investment is withdrawn 
 socially.” Hocquenghem argues (so much forjudges Norris and Rein¬ 
 hardt) that “only homosexuals make such constant libidinal use of 
 this zone,” and, as a result, “homosexual desire challenges anality- 
 sublimation because it restores the desiring use of the anus.” This res¬ 
 toration in turn subverts the oppositional organization of social life 
 into public and private categories. Homosexuality takes the erotic- 
 organic anal space of privatization and of the constitution of one’s 
 proper self (“Control of the anus is the precondition of taking re¬ 
 sponsibility for property. The ability to ‘hold back’ or to evacuate the 
 feces is the necessary moment of the constitution of the self”), and 
 violates this sheltered space.In practicing the desiring use of the 
 anus, the homosexual liberates the foundation of privacy from public 
 deprivation. He makes the anus a public competitor with the phallus: 
 he unseats property and privacy by publicly exposing their source. 
 
 We can see at once in Hocquenghem a relevance to the Supreme 
 Court’s obsession with privacy, and to Andrews’s use of narrative. 
 Although the Court speaks up on behalf of intimate sexual privacy, 
 insofar as that privacy concerns consensual heterosexuality, the 
 source of its concern is deeper than nonsodomite genitality. Its source 
 
278 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 is the heart of the individual, but this heart’s model turns out to be 
 the anus. Justifying the outla\ving of sodomy, the Court—and the 
 public—can hide from themselves the equation of anality with cher¬ 
 ished fundamental inwardness. Homosexual desire to liberate the 
 anus from sexual prohibition threatens the purposive unconscious¬ 
 ness of this equation, and threatens individuation and privacy too. 
 The judicial police cannot permit these threats. Allowing the states 
 and the Constitution to supervise what men and women do with their 
 anuses paradoxically insures privatization, and the withdrawal of the 
 anus from any association with public value or significance. Thus the 
 homosexual must not be allowed fundamental rights to consensual 
 anal sodomy; that would be virtually to assign (in public!) an asshole 
 to the Constitution. No such thing could be in the make-up or the 
 makers-up of that document; and if it were there, it would be, natu¬ 
 rally, insignificant—and utterly private. But the homosexual impulse 
 is to advance this private insignificance, to connect more closely with 
 the public this anal privacy upon which identity is founded. Of course 
 the accomplishment of the connection would transform public and 
 private alike. 
 
 As for fictional narrative, this transformational impulse is con¬ 
 nected by Andrews with a contention between storytelling and other 
 forms of discourse and ideology. Judicial discourse permits narrative 
 only an inferior place in its adjudications: personal stories must sub¬ 
 mit themselves to the law’s analytic structural discourse. The law 
 expresses to Michael Hardwick’s or to Perry Watkins’s specific stories 
 (in all their interrelations) an equivalent of the remark by one of 
 Terry’s lovers, who finds The Story of Harold in the bathroom and, 
 beginning to read, exclaims: “‘Fuckin’ Harold woke up one fuckin’ 
 morning’—what is this shit?”'® For official discourse, that is to say, 
 narratives are dross, useful only for spinning into strictly articulated 
 nonfictional gold. Nevertheless, in Andrews’s book the messiness of 
 narrative (it can’t control itself) and the lowness of its origin vio¬ 
 late mature, reasonable order and discourse—and thereby prop up, 
 extend, and transform life. 
 
 I am not using Andrews to say that narrative has always or essen¬ 
 tially a relation to sodomy or anality. I am using him to suggest that 
 narrative will attach itself to—and will shelter, in a kind of pub- 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 279 
 
 lie housing—whatever narrative’s environing general ideologies and 
 specific discourses make homeless. If, thanks to the ideological and 
 discursive environment, not enough light from the idea of life reaches 
 the homeless, then narrative can attach itself to the anus and find 
 us a solar consolation even there. But since 1 mention the home, 
 and suggest a domestication of the homeless in the same breath as 
 1 allude to Bataille, 1 must again consider the homophobic hazards 
 apparently courted (as ideological narrative poetics would point out) 
 by The Story of Harold’s philoprogenitiveness. How can or does the 
 novel draw upon sodomy for its very model of representation and 
 not compromise its sources by linking the latter to family feeling? 
 Hoequenghem the theorist of anal desublimation intends to undo two 
 systematic economies of phallic rule: the economies of capitalism 
 and of the modern family. For him Freudianism is a subset of these 
 economies, and he defends sodomite anality against co-optation by a 
 discourse about the family. He fears that the eroticized anus will be 
 accounted for as a secondary consequence of an unresolved hetero¬ 
 sexual Oedipus complex. Such consideration would reinscribe homo¬ 
 phobia in any theory of the anus; it would desublimate anality by 
 making it all too familiarly familial. 
 
 But the suspicion of discursive self-entrapment—the fear of that 
 process of simultaneous self-enabling and self-undoing which is seen 
 by ideological narrative poetics to be characteristic of all discourse— 
 makes Hoequenghem’s thinking falter. How does his theory fit—if at 
 all—with lesbian desire? What matter if, as he says, “The anus is not 
 a substitute for the vagina: women have one as well as men’’;*® since 
 in making this assertion so as to ward off “oedipalization,” Hoequeng¬ 
 hem overlooks the way male sodomites will gender the anus, careless 
 that both genders “have one.’’ If the theorist worries that the anus is 
 a substitute for the vagina, is he not already oedipalized in thought? 
 The fear of compromise with “oedipalization” and “family” leads the 
 theorist not even to ask, let alone answer, questions that lie in his 
 logic’s path. In Andrews’s light I suggest that the theorist’s neglect 
 of children underlies and intensifies this fear of the family. It is an 
 odd neglect, since the fear seems to be itself based on a child’s ter¬ 
 ror of a grimly phallic parental figure. Precisely what this terrified 
 child needs—i.e., another kind of parent—is forgotten in the theo- 
 
280 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 rist’s terror-based hostility to the family in general. Clearly Andrews 
 means to present Terry and his lovers Anne and the surgeon as such 
 parental alternatives. 
 
 At first sight the surgeon Jim appears to be anything but an ideal. 
 Seen in the light of Terry’s angry and despairing fixation, Jim’s re¬ 
 fusal to declare his love for any of the men who sodomize him looks 
 purely homophobic, an aggressive counterdefense against his pursuit 
 of passive anal pleasure, usually in a dangerously masochistic form 
 (because it includes penetration by the lover’s fist). But the narrative 
 suggests a curious motive (albeit not the only one) for this pursuit. 
 The surgeon has a blind child (another version of Barney—and of 
 Oedipus), whom he is desperate to help. This desperation appears to 
 extend itself into an obsessive pursuit of sexual danger and transgres¬ 
 sion. It is as if the father is using sexual obsession and excess in his 
 relations with men to push against all ordinary limits, and so is prac¬ 
 ticing a kind of sympathetic magic on his child’s behalf. For if the 
 adult can exceed the conventional constraints (even the constraints 
 of physiology) upon adult sexuality, then he can take hope in his 
 child’s ability to overcome the constraints of blindness. The father’s 
 sexual activity with other adults is presented in this way as an ex¬ 
 tension of a desire to prop up a failing child’s life. Jim does not love 
 Terry for himself, but the reason for this is not homophobia. He loves 
 him as part of a project that uses Eros to gain for his family more 
 light from the idea of life. 
 
 Sexuality, domesticity, and narrative in The Story of Harold are 
 alike derivatives, one is made to feel, of a pursuit of life more ele¬ 
 mental than each. This pursuit is for the sake of children, and is also 
 every child’s own, in the face of the child’s biological and emotional 
 dependency that makes the pursuit especially vulnerable. In the face 
 of Barney’s and Terry’s suicidal woes, what matters is any and every 
 form of nurture that stimulates the child to keep on living. Domes¬ 
 ticity is inevitably one of these modes; whatever griefs it causes chil¬ 
 dren, if we condemn the ideology of parenting and of the family 
 altogether, we are suggesting that supporting children’s lives is not 
 just politically but humanly reactionary, even anti-vital. Outside of 
 academic discourse, this is a hard suggestion to swallow. Moreover, 
 parental nurture is scarcely the monopoly of conventional domes- 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 281 
 
 ticity or of heterosexuality—unless we agree with Jack Kemp’s point 
 of view. Terry’s gradual commitment to being one of Barney’s parents 
 —a commitment that is terminated willingly upon the appearance of 
 a stepfather for the boy—is and is not domestic. 
 
 One of the problems with Miller’s picture of the family is that he 
 does not see the family produce connections with anything but arms 
 of the law. Presumably work and friendship are also disciplinary rela¬ 
 tions. But although Freud’s darkest reflections on the murderousness 
 of the supervisory superego influence Miller’s kind of poetics. The 
 Story of Harold reminds us of relations—the work of storytelling, the 
 work of friendship—that escape punitive agency. Terry’s and Barney’s 
 isolated privacies foster in them a killing sadism and masochism, but 
 the work of nurturing friendship that brings them together, limiting 
 their privacy, fosters in them a love of life that resists the destruc¬ 
 tive superego. The representation of Terry’s growing parental stature 
 shows no mere imitation of the straight world; it is rather an imita¬ 
 tion of fantastic storytelling, which has here more nurturing power 
 than any other form of vital organization. I might add, finally, that to 
 suggest homosexual interest in nurturing children is a “pro-straight” 
 sign of homophobia is the equivalent of suggesting that every homo¬ 
 sexual’s interest in children is the sign of pedophilia. 
 
 In The Story of Harold stories prop up, parent-fashion, the vital 
 functions of children by displacing children’s immediate concerns, 
 and hence by making them feel liberated from those concerns’ re¬ 
 straints and vulnerabilities. Bringing about “meetings of the unthink¬ 
 able and the real,” Terry’s stories enact these liberations by dissolving 
 and diffusing the identities and the inwardness of the narrator and his 
 listeners.® In his narratives Terry’s and Barney’s “selves” appear in a 
 metamorphic series—they are by turns the magical Harold (whose 
 actions resemble the surgeon-lover’s pushing against limits), a ran- 
 corously oedipalized Rumpelstiltskin, a sullenly and reluctantly anti¬ 
 social Rat, an all-devouring rage called the Three-legged Nothing, 
 a Family Jewel called Mama Pin. These fissurings of Terry’s and 
 Barney’s “identity” escape Terry’s narrative control, much to his own 
 surprise. But it is the uncontrollable aspects of narrative that con¬ 
 stitute its vitalizing effect—even when the effect is frightening. The 
 Mama Pin character is intended to provide Barney with a sweet way 
 
282 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 for him to come to terms with his real mother, but the intention mis¬ 
 carries into terror—as does another, later story, which provokes the 
 boy to swallow Seconal. But these dark turns of Andrews’s narrative 
 exhibit a less dark assertion: that narrative courts the death of iden¬ 
 tity to make life more full of relations, hence more vital. In spite of 
 the dangerous confusions Barney and Terry muddle through, when 
 Barney begins to take over the storytelling he shows signs of having 
 gotten Terry’s point: the sodomite above all wants the child to live, 
 in and through a realm that is not private. 
 
 The heterosexual world sees the homosexual’s relation to children 
 as a version of Rumpelstiltskin. Presumably the canny homosexual 
 pariah wants the child not for the sake of extending the child’s life, 
 but for the sake of a nefarious purpose, opposed to the natural family 
 and natural sexuality. In child custody cases where a homosexual 
 parent is concerned, the judicial tradition makes its overture to nar¬ 
 rative by usually treating the gay parent as the nasty dwarf. But 
 what impact do homosexual parents have on children? A Brigham 
 Young University research team, reviewing the seventeen studies on 
 the subject since 1978, finds that there is no evidence substantiat¬ 
 ing heterosexual fears about the detrimental effects of homosexual 
 parents on children. “No evidence of aberrant gender identity, social 
 development, or sexual object choice’’ is reported.^' Does this mean 
 that homosexual parenting and homosexual domesticity have no in¬ 
 fluence on the status quo? If the children of even the most modest 
 estimate of the number (1.5 million) of American homosexual par¬ 
 ents can witness that their parents have wanted them above all to 
 live, with no nefarious intention, we might expect the heart of the 
 existing order—even its judicial heart—to be changed. We might ex¬ 
 pect homosexuals to be recognized as citizens of the public realm. 
 Even so, perhaps as long as the ideology of legal discourse resists 
 narrative, 1 cannot be sanguine about the transformation. 
 
 Andrews’s Terry is fascinated by an ontological rather than by an 
 erotic triangle—“These three things: The Impossible, the Possible, 
 the Real.’’” In spite of attempts by judicial or critical police to straiten 
 narratives, narrative relations—as the great sodomite (or would-be 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 283 
 
 sodomite) storyteller says—stop nowhere in their traversal of the 
 triangular dialectic. Because of the dialectic’s open-endedness, the 
 categories of the status quo can be transformed with the help of 
 stories. Such transformation, however, can involve (as it does in 
 Andrews) a further metamorphosis: one whereby the real, the pos¬ 
 sible, and the impossible change places. In relation to Hardwick and 
 its legal progeny, homosexual fiction becomes a shelter for homo¬ 
 sexual reality, a shelter from whose perspective the legal discourse 
 appears to be a realm of shadow-puppets. The puppets argue about 
 what homosexual identity is, determining to fix it, so that they can 
 decide if it is “suspect” or criminal, can either liberate it or supervise 
 it. To homosexuals, these debates appear to be exercises—whether 
 sympathetic or not—in making up crude fictions, unacknowledged as 
 such by their makers. Blacks and women know this experience, in 
 which general ideology, and this or that institutional practice of it, 
 becomes unreal to a whole segment of a population. It is not of much 
 interest for those who know this experience to be told that, after 
 all, every social order and conflict is entirely a network of arbitrary 
 constructions in which the adversaries reinforce their dilemmas by a 
 secret-yet-open likeness to each other. In the light (or darkness) of 
 such knowledge, nothing changes; the powerful unreal constructions 
 still do harm to those whom their powerful ideologies cannot engage 
 as real lives. Against oppressive Victorian powers Dickens kept in¬ 
 sisting that his fictions were true, for the stories unhoused by official 
 Victorian discourse had to take up their abode in what was left them 
 —the abode classified by the judges and the police as unreal. And 
 now in contemporary American fictions, homosexual realities un¬ 
 housed by official judicial discourse similarly take up abode in the 
 realm designated officially as impossible, as narratives out of court. 
 
 I will put the idea that fictional narratives of homosexual desire for 
 public life and of homosexual philoprogenitiveness might reproduce 
 the homophobic impulses of their opponents next to one last judi¬ 
 cial discourse, resulting from Hardwick, less than two months after 
 the Court decision’s announcement. Appeal in Tima County Juvenile 
 Action B- 10489 , an Arizona case, tells us that an admittedly bisexual 
 man, licensed by the appropriate Arizona state agency to be placed 
 among prospective adoptive parents who wait to be matched with 
 
284 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 adoptive children, had his license revoked by the Superior Court of 
 Pima County. Judge James D. Hathaway of the Court of Appeals 
 upheld the revocation. Hathaway says that he does not uphold the 
 Superior Court on the grounds that the appellant is bisexual. Instead 
 he claims that the appellant lives in a way not in the best interests of 
 a child who might be adopted by him. The evidence for this is that 
 the appellant “has held at least eight different employment positions 
 in eleven years; . . . has sought counseling for personal problems 
 repeatedly,” and has a “limited” family support system. And then 
 there is Hardwick: 
 
 Homosexual conduct [in Arizona] is proscribed. . . . Such statutes 
 have been held constitutional. . . . Appellant testified that it was 
 possible he . . . would have some type of homosexual relationship 
 . . . even with placement of a child in his home. He also testified 
 ... he did not believe . . . continued homosexual activity would 
 have an adverse effect on a child ... he might adopt. It would be 
 anomalous for the state on the one hand to declare homosexual 
 conduct unlawful and on the other create a parent after that 
 proscribed model, in effect approving that standard, inimical to 
 the natural family, as head of a state-created family.” 
 
 The dissenting judge in this case, Lawrence Howard, is outraged. 
 Hathaway, Howard points out, distorts every point of evidence about 
 the appellant. With a specificity of detail that is absent in Hathaway’s 
 decision, the dissent points out the grounds on which the appellant’s 
 case worker had recommended certification. There is a support sys¬ 
 tem, it appears: the appellant’s changes of employment are explained 
 as the result of his listing various business consultant jobs on his 
 vita; the appellant is a teacher at Pima Community College, with a 
 salary of more than $32,000 a year (in 1985). As for the counseling 
 “problem,” the appellant sought psychiatric help upon his honor¬ 
 able discharge from the Navy twelve years before; it turns out that 
 Hathaway is including in the appellant’s “repeated” counseling needs 
 the appellant’s statement that “I occasionally, probably two or three 
 times a year make an appointment with a pastoral counselor, to talk 
 about what’s going on in my life.” As for the welfare of the child 
 to be adopted in this case. Judge Howard points out that Hathaway 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 285 
 
 not only ignores everything the appellant’s caseworker says about his 
 parental ability, but makes a spectral, nonexistent child the mea¬ 
 sure of the court’s decision. B-10489 seeks to adopt a school-age 
 child, and the caseworker speaks to the court about the advantage 
 for many adoptive children of a single-parent family. But Hathaway 
 —the friend of the “natural” family—worries that B-10489 wants a 
 child for the purpose of sexually abusing it. This idea, and the idea of 
 a homosexual parent’s “recruiting” a child for homosexuality, seems 
 to be the focus of Hathaway’s considerations of the child’s best in¬ 
 terest. What the caseworker has to say about the impact of parental 
 homosexuality, which is along the lines of the Bulletin of the Ameri¬ 
 can Academy of Psychiatry and the Law article, does not matter. Nor 
 does the fact that no specific child is yet at issue. But “until there is 
 a particular child and a petition to adopt that child,” Howard writes, 
 the standards concerning the child’s best interests do not apply.^’' And 
 as for Hardwick’s impact on the case, Howard believes it should not 
 be used in a way that bears adversely on homosexual or bisexual 
 adoptive parents if it does not bear on every parent. What shall the 
 law do to investigate whether parents of any kind are sodomites? 
 
 But B-10489 has lost his case. And even the decent dissenting judge 
 shows the biases of judicial discourse: he is pleased that B-10489 has 
 nothing to do with gay rights activism, for that might well render 
 an applicant unacceptable.” The homosexual must take no politi¬ 
 cally active, no public recourse against Whites and Hathaways; his 
 virtue remains his privacy. In this note of Judge Howard’s we see 
 how the police maintain liberty by their intervening supervision of 
 it. But what of B-10489, and his relation to the insights of ideologi¬ 
 cal narrative poetics? How does his case exhibit his complicity with 
 his adversaries? Having found B-10489’s need for counseling to be sus¬ 
 pect, Judge Hathaway’s decision has probably intensified that need. 
 So we might convey to B-10489 the following suspicious counsels de¬ 
 rived from ideological narrative poetics: that he has perhaps desired 
 a parental relation to a child in order to become one with his oppres¬ 
 sors: that in losing the case he might be consoled to find that he is, 
 after all, not one with the all-policing judiciary. Yet we must suggest 
 to him, then, that in losing his case he has really not become the 
 adversary of the court—in his privacy he inhabits the cherished right 
 
286 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 and the ideology of his oppressor, and becomes like him once more. 
 And should he think of moving forward into public action again (but 
 this time without “domestic” ideological baggage), we will remind 
 B-10489 that this will cause him to become only another of the agen¬ 
 cies of power to which he seeks to become an alternative. Of course, 
 we cannot surmise what the hypothetical child who did not find a 
 life support in B-10489 would think of these insights. As for the man, 
 at least he has some alternatively consoling ways of thinking about 
 his case, and even of carrying it on—ways that are not derivable 
 from ideological narrative poetics. His impossible aim and appeal 
 are housed already, have even succeeded, in novels like The Talking 
 Room and The Story of Harold. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Tolice (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 81-82. 
 
 2 Ibid., 76, 85, 2, 104. 
 
 3 Ibid., 20. 
 
 4 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (Nor¬ 
 folk, 1976), 161. 
 
 5 Miller, Novel and the Police, 100. 
 
 6 Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology. 185, 124, 126, 140. 
 
 7 Bowers V. Hardwick, 106 S. Ct. 2841 (1986), 2844. 
 
 8 Ibid., 2851, 2854. 
 
 9 Watkins v. United States Army, 837 E.2d 1428 (9th Cir. 1988), 1442. 
 
 10 Ibid., 1457, 1461, 1455, 1454. 1454 n. 4. 
 
 11 Bowers v. Hardwick, 2846, 2854 n. 5. 
 
 12 Watkins v. United States Army, 1459. 
 
 13 Marianne Hauser, The Talking Room (New York, 1976), 42. 
 
 14 Douglas Jehl, “Dukakis Seeks Gays’ Support, Draws Occasional Hisses,” Los Ange¬ 
 les Times, 15 May 1988, sec. i. 
 
 15 Hauser, Talking Room, 92-93. 
 
 16 Terry Andrews, The Story of Harold (New York, 1974), 318. 
 
 17 Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (London, 1978), 
 80, 82-85. 
 
 18 Andrews, Story of Harold, 42. 
 
 19 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 89. 
 
 20 Andrews, Story of Harold, 56. 
 
 21 David J. Kleber, Robert J. Howell, and Alta Lura Tibbits-Kleber, “The Impact of 
 Parental Homosexuality in Child Custody Cases: A Review of the Literature,” 
 Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 14 (1986): 83. 
 
Supreme Court Discourse vs. Homosexual Fiction 287 
 
 22 Andrews, Story of Harold, 57. 
 
 23 Appeal in Pima County Juvenile Action B-I 0489 , 727 P.2d 830 (Ariz. App. 1986), 
 832, 835. 
 
 24 Ibid., 836, 842. 
 
 25 Ibid., 840. 
 
V' ;' 
 
 • ■ ■,•■;■.*'*.» W.> 
 
 !. t'-r»v >,' ,«i^ y^:’ . -v 
 
 H;?S ■ 
 
 ■'-•■ ■■ r" #,..! 
 
 ' • .?'./ Vsgf.! « 
 
 .,.MV -r\V ?.|« ■■ 1^ ^ 
 
 ■:,:. X- • >''^‘‘f ♦••iEisS! ■ -' ■ ■' 
 
 '*.’•' ,1" ■".%.) 
 
Lee Edelman 
 
 The Plague of Discourse: Politics, 
 Literary Theory, and AIDS 
 
 In an article titled “The Metaphor of AIDS,” 
 published for a popular audience in the Sun¬ 
 day magazine of the Boston Globe, Lee Grove, 
 an instructor of creative writing and Ameri¬ 
 can literature at the University of Massachu¬ 
 setts, reflects on the ways in which the AIDS 
 epidemic has altered his understanding of lit¬ 
 erary texts and his relation to the teaching 
 of literature. Referring specifically to the Re¬ 
 naissance pun that brought together, at least 
 linguistically, the experiences of orgasm and 
 death. Grove writes: 
 
 “To die,” “to have sex”—that coupling 
 has always been figurative, metaphorical, 
 sophisticated wordplay, a literary conceit, 
 one of those outrageous paradoxes dear to 
 the heart of a racy divine like John Donne. 
 
 Outrageous no longer. The coupling isn’t 
 figurative anymore. It’s literal.' 
 
 1 want to consider the highly charged re¬ 
 lation between the literal and the figural as 
 it informs the discussion of AIDS in America 
 and to explore the political uses to which the 
 
290 Lee Edelman 
 
 ideological framing of that relationship has been put. Toward that 
 end my subtitle locates “literary theory” between the categories of 
 “politics” and “AIDS” to indicate my belief that both of those cate¬ 
 gories produce, and are produced as, historical discourses suscepti¬ 
 ble to analysis by the critical methodologies associated with literary 
 theory. 
 
 This is not to say that literary theory occupies some unproblem¬ 
 atic or privileged position; to the contrary, literature, including that 
 form of literature that is literary theory, is by no means distinct from 
 political discourse, and thus from either the discourse on AIDS, or 
 the politics that governs the discourse on AIDS. By the same token, 
 politics and AIDS cannot be disentangled from their implication in 
 the linguistic or the rhetorical. Indeed, one of the ideological op¬ 
 positions 1 would call into question is that whereby the biological, 
 associated with the literal or the “real,” is counterposed against the 
 literary, associated with the figural or the Active. That opposition is 
 already deeply and unavoidably political, which is to say, it bespeaks 
 an ideologically determined hierarchy of values in which power—the 
 power to speak seriously, to speak with authority, and thereby to in¬ 
 fluence policy—is very much at stake in the claim to be able to speak 
 literally. 
 
 The AIDS epidemic, then, is not to be construed, as Grove asserts, 
 in terms of its defiguralizing literality, but rather, and more dan¬ 
 gerously, as the breeding ground for all sorts of figural associations 
 whose virulence derives from their presentation under the aspect of 
 literality. Indeed, one of the most disturbing features that charac¬ 
 terizes the discourse on AIDS in America is the way in which the 
 literal is recurrently and tendentiously produced as a figure whose 
 figurality remains strategically occluded—a figure that thus has the 
 potential to be used toward the most politically repressive ends. The 
 often hysterical terms within which the Western discussion of AIDS 
 has been conducted reflect an untenable, but politically manipulable, 
 belief that we can separate biological science, and therefore the social 
 policy based on that science, from the instability and duplicity that 
 literary theory has increasingly identified as inherent in the opera¬ 
 tions of language. 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 291 
 
 Though my subject necessarily involves literature and AIDS, my 
 focus falls not on those literary works wherein the urgency of AIDS 
 achieves thematic inscription, but rather on the inevitable inscrip¬ 
 tions of the literary that mark the discourse on AIDS. The text that 
 provides the occasion for my analysis, the text on which my re¬ 
 marks will turn or trope, is a relatively brief one, “Silence = Death.” 
 This slogan has achieved wide currency, particularly—though by 
 no means exclusively—within the gay community, both as a chal¬ 
 lenge to the murderously delayed and cynically inadequate official 
 responses to AIDS and as a rallying cry for those who have borne 
 the burden of death and suffering, calling upon them to defend them¬ 
 selves against the dangerous discourse of mastery produced by medi¬ 
 cal or legislative authorities in order to defend their own vested in¬ 
 terests in the face of this epidemic. Significantly, issues of defense 
 achieve an inevitable centrality in discussions of AIDS in ways that 
 critically distinguish this epidemic from many others. Because the 
 syndrome attacks the body’s defensive mechanisms: because once it 
 does so, science as yet can offer no defense against it; because in 
 the West it has appeared primarily among groups already engaged in 
 efforts to defend themselves against the intolerance of the dominant 
 culture; because modern science and the national political institu¬ 
 tions funding modern science feel called upon to defend their prestige 
 against the assault on medical know-how represented by this disease; 
 because individuals and groups, often irrationally, seek ways to de¬ 
 fend themselves against contact with this disease: and because some 
 politicians, in order to defend against political opposition, deploy the 
 AIDS issue strategically to ensure their own political survival: for all 
 of these reasons the question of defense is inextricably and distinc¬ 
 tively inscribed in the discourse on AIDS. And as this preliminary 
 formulation of the issues suggests, my focus is on the interrelations 
 among the notions of discourse, defense, and disease—particularly as 
 they intersect with the already activated ideologies of homosexuality 
 and homophobia in the West to converge at the virulent site of dis¬ 
 cursive contention that is AIDS. 
 
292 Lee Edelman 
 
 These last words seem to define AIDS in a way that few in the 
 medical profession would recognize, so let me present a definition 
 of AIDS at the outset that will seem more literal, or as students of 
 rhetoric would say, more “proper.” According to current scientific 
 understanding, and I hasten to add that it is not my intention nec¬ 
 essarily to endorse or validate that understanding, AIDS results from 
 infection with some quantity of HIV or Human Immunodeficiency 
 Virus, which attacks the cells of the immune system, particularly the 
 T-helper or T-4 cells, and impairs the body’s ability to defend itself 
 against viral, fungal, and parasitic infections. Medical researchers 
 would thus accept a characterization of AIDS as an infectious condi¬ 
 tion in which the stake is “literally” the possibility of defense. As 
 David Black puts it simply in The Plague Years, his “chronicle” of 
 AIDS, “the immune system is the body’s complex and still imper¬ 
 fectly understood defense mechanism. Its job is to tell the difference 
 between Self and Not-Self.”^ I will come back to the Emersonian im¬ 
 plications of this description of the immune response, but for now I 
 want to examine the notion of defense and its importance not only in 
 the bio-logic articulated within the body by AIDS, but also in the re¬ 
 active or defensive discourse embodied in the slogan Silence = Death. 
 For if that slogan challenges those in the communities most affected 
 by AIDS to defend themselves, it does so by appealing to defensive 
 properties that it implicitly identifies as inherent in discourse. The 
 slogan, after all, which most frequently appears in a graphic con¬ 
 figuration that positions the letters of its text, in white, beneath a 
 pink triangle on a field of black, alludes to the Nazi campaign against 
 homosexuals (identified in the concentration camps by the pink tri¬ 
 angle they were required to wear) in order to propose a gay equiva¬ 
 lent to the post-Holocaust rallying cry of Jewish activists: “Never 
 again.” At the same time. Silence = Death can be read as a post- 
 AIDS revision of a motto popular among gay militants not long ago 
 —“Out of the closets and into the streets”—and as such it similarly 
 implies that language, discourse, public manifestations are necessary 
 weapons of defense in a contemporary strategy of gay survival. For if 
 we assert that Silence = Death, then one corollary to this theorem 
 in the geometry that governs the relationship among discourse, de¬ 
 fense, and disease must be that Discourse = Defense, that language. 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 293 
 
 articulation, the intervention of voice, is salutary, vivifying, since 
 discourse can defend us against the death that must result from the 
 continuation of our silence. 
 
 But to speak of mechanisms of defense, particularly in terms of lin¬ 
 guistic operations, is necessarily to invoke the specter of Freud, who 
 offered us a taxonomy of psychic defenses in his studies of the un¬ 
 conscious and its operations. And here, as always, Freud calls into 
 question the basis for any naive optimism about the success of our 
 defensive maneuvers. Here is a passage from H. D.’s memoir of her 
 psychoanalysis by Freud that speaks to the relation between discourse 
 and defense in a particularly telling way: only once, according to 
 H. D., did Freud ever “lay down the law” and that was when he said 
 “never—1 mean, never at any time, in any circumstance, endeavor to 
 defend me, if and when you hear abusive remarks made about me and 
 my work.” H. D. then goes on to recall: “He explained it carefully. 
 He might have been giving a lesson in geometry or demonstrating the 
 inevitable course of a disease once the virus has entered the system. 
 At this point, he seemed to indicate (as if there were a chart of the 
 fever patient, pinned on the wall before us), at the least suggestion 
 that you may be about to begin a counterargument in my defense, the 
 anger or frustration of the assailant will be driven deeper. You will do 
 no good to the detractor by mistakenly beginning a logical defense. 
 You will drive the hatred or the fear or the prejudice in deeper.”^ 
 Defense of this sort is necessarily failed defense: far from being salu¬ 
 brious, it serves only to compromise further one’s immunity and to 
 stimulate greater virulence. Interestingly enough, this corresponds 
 to the process whereby, according to some medical researchers, HIV 
 moves from a state of latency in an infected cell to active reproduc¬ 
 tion. The defensive “stimulation of an immune response” seems to be 
 one of “the conditions that activates the production of new” HIV that 
 can then go on to infect other cells.^ Since defensive maneuvers may 
 have the unintended effect of disseminating or intensifying infection, 
 the relationship between the two can be rearticulated in the formula: 
 Defense = Disease. 
 
 Freud’s argument in warning H. D. against engaging in defensive 
 interventions significantly echoes the logic sounded centuries earlier 
 by Plato in the Timaeus. Writing specifically about the wisdom of 
 
294 Lee Edelman 
 
 medical interventions to defend the body against the ravages of dis¬ 
 ease, Plato offers a cautionary note; “diseases unless they are very 
 dangerous should not be irritated by medicines, since every form of 
 disease is in a manner akin to the living being, whose complex frame 
 has an appointed term of life. . . . And this holds also of the consti¬ 
 tution of diseases: if any one regardless of the appointed time tries to 
 subdue them by medicine, he only aggravates and multiplies them.”^ 
 The word here translated as “medicine” derives, as Jacques Derrida 
 argues in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” from the Greek word pharmakon signi¬ 
 fying a drug or philter that occupies an ambiguous position as remedy 
 and poison at once. Commenting on this passage from Plato, Derrida 
 observes: “Just as health is auto-nomous and auto-matic, ‘normal’ 
 disease demonstrates its autarky by confronting the pharmaceutical 
 aggression with metastatic reactions which displace the site of the 
 disease, with the eventual result that the points of resistance are re¬ 
 inforced and multiplied.”* Thus for Plato, as for Freud, gestures of 
 defense can aggravate rather than ameliorate one’s condition. Freud, 
 of course, is referring explicitly to language or discourse as a mecha¬ 
 nism of defense against one’s enemies or detractors; H. D.’s reference 
 to the “course of a disease once the virus has entered the system” is 
 clearly presented only as a figural embellishment. Plato, on the other 
 hand, is referring explicitly to medical defenses against disease, but 
 considerations of discourse are decisively at issue in his discussion as 
 well. 
 
 In the long and complicated argument unfolded in “Plato’s Phar¬ 
 macy,” Derrida shows how Plato identifies writing with the phar¬ 
 makon, thus rendering it simultaneously a poison, a remedy, a fantas¬ 
 tic or magical philter, and a rational medical technology. If writing 
 as pharmakon is already, at the beginning of Western culture, produc¬ 
 ing an entanglement of literary and medical discourse, its antithesis, 
 the true voice of speech, is identified by Plato in the Phaedrus with 
 the vital force of logos. Thus Derrida characterizes Plato’s notion of 
 logos in the following words: 
 
 Logos is a zoon. An animal that is born, grows, belongs to the 
 phusis. Linguistics, logic, dialectics, and zoology are all in the 
 same camp. 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 295 
 
 In describing logos as a zoon, Plato is following certain rhetors 
 and sophists before him who, as a contrast to the cadaverous 
 rigidity of writing, had held up the living spoken word/ 
 
 Derrida’s strategy in deconstructing the opposition between speech 
 and writing is to show how the living word of speech is already in¬ 
 formed by or predicated upon a form of writing or an archi-ecriture. 
 But of particular importance for my purposes is the way in which Der¬ 
 rida’s reading of Plato insists upon the inextricability of the textual 
 and the biological even as it uses rhetorical or literary techniques to 
 subvert or dismantle the rational edifice of the Western philosophical 
 tradition. 
 
 Consider again Derrida’s gloss on Plato’s wariness about the phar- 
 makon in Timaeus: “Just as health is auto-nomous and auto-matic, 
 ‘normal’ disease demonstrates its autarky by confronting the phar¬ 
 maceutical aggression with metastatic reactions which displace the 
 site of the disease, with the eventual result that the points of resis¬ 
 tance are reinforced or multiplied.’’ Bearing in mind that Derrida’s 
 reading of the pharmakon explicitly invokes the critical conjunction 
 of discourse and biology informing the platonic opposition between 
 writing as supplement and speech as living word, his gloss suggests 
 that defensive strategies deployed—in the realm of discourse or dis¬ 
 ease—to combat agencies of virulence may themselves be informed 
 by the virulence they are seeking to efface, informed by it in ways 
 that do not produce the immunizing effect of a vaccine, but that 
 serve, instead, to reinforce and even multiply the dangerous sites of 
 infection. Derrida makes explicit this pathology of rhetoric when, 
 elsewhere in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” he remarks that “metaphoricity is 
 the contamination of logic and the logic of contamination.”® In other 
 words. Disease = Discourse. Derrida’s diagnosis of metaphor as con¬ 
 tamination makes clear that the rationalism of philosophical logic— 
 a rationalism that provides the foundation for Western medical and 
 scientific practice—is not untainted by the figurality that philosophy 
 repudiates as literary, and, in consequence, as deceptive, inessential, 
 and expendable. Both logic and contamination are very much at stake 
 in the unfolding of these infectiously multiplying equations. Perhaps 
 by returning to the germ of these remarks it will be possible to see 
 
296 Lee Edelman 
 
 how the logic of equations distinctively contaminates the discourse 
 on AIDS. 
 
 Against my initial text, Silence = Death, let me juxtapose a pas¬ 
 sage from an open letter written by Larry Kramer, AIDS activist and 
 author of, among other things. The Normal Heart, a play about the 
 difficulties of getting Americans—gay and straight alike—to pay seri¬ 
 ous attention to the AIDS epidemic. Outraged by dilatory and inade¬ 
 quate responses at the early stages of the medical crisis, Kramer is 
 quoted as having addressed the following words to both the press and 
 the leaders of the gay rights movement: “That all of you . . . continue 
 to refuse to transmit to the public the facts and figures of what is 
 happening daily makes you, in my mind, equal to murderers.”’ Beside 
 Kramer’s remark I would place a graffito that David Black describes 
 as having been scrawled on a wall at New York University: “Gay 
 Rights = AIDS.”'” A somewhat less overtly homophobic but no less 
 insidious version of this notion is offered by Frances Fitzgerald in her 
 analysis of the effects of AIDS on San Francisco’s Castro Street com¬ 
 munity: “The gay carnival, with its leather masks and ball gowns, 
 had thus been the twentieth-century equivalent of the Masque of the 
 Red Death.”" And finally, here is a quotation from a “26-year-old- 
 never-married woman” cited by Masters and Johnson in Newsweek 
 magazine’s excerpt from their controversial book on AIDS: “No sex, 
 no worries. No sex, no AIDS. It’s really a very simple equation, isn’t 
 it?”'^ Even this brief list indicates that it is by no means a “simple 
 equation,” but rather a complex pattern of equations that must lead 
 us to consider just what is at issue in this effort to translate dif¬ 
 ferences (such as silence/death, leaders/murderers, gay rights/AIDS) 
 into identities through a language that invokes the rhetorical form 
 of mathematical or scientific inevitability (A = B), a language of 
 equations that can be marshaled in the service of homophobic (Gay 
 Rights = AIDS) or antihomophobic (Silence = Death) discourse. 
 
 In thinking about this we would do well to recall that it is precisely 
 the question of equality, the post-Stonewall demand for equal rights 
 for gays, that has mobilized in unprecedented ways both of these 
 discursive fields. Indeed, the already complex matter of AIDS is ex¬ 
 ponentially complicated by the fact that the homophobic response to 
 the demands for gay equality, long before the phenomenon of AIDS, 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 297 
 
 was largely predicated on the equation of homosexuality with the 
 unnatural, the irrational, and the diseased. The logic of homopho¬ 
 bia thus rests upon the very same binary that enables Plato in the 
 Phaedrus to value speech at the expense of writing—and lest this as¬ 
 sertion seem too frivolous or far-fetched an association, let me cite 
 another passage from Derrida’s reading of Plato: “the conclusion of 
 the Phaedrus is less a condemnation of writing in the name of present 
 speech than a preference for one sort of writing over another, for the 
 fertile trace over the sterile trace, for a seed that engenders because 
 it is planted inside over a seed scattered wastefully outside: at the 
 risk of dissemination.’’^^ If Derrida displaces the opposition between 
 speech and writing by identifying speech itself as just another “sort of 
 writing,” he thereby calls into question the logic of the Western philo¬ 
 sophical tradition that claims to be able to identify and distinguish 
 the true from the false, the natural from the unnatural. In so doing 
 he enacts the law of transgression that he sees as operative in “both 
 the writing and the pederasty of a young man named Plato,” a “trans¬ 
 gression . . . not thinkable within the terms of classical logic but only 
 within the graphics of the supplement or of the pharmakon .” ''' Decon¬ 
 struction, as a disseminative project, then, can be subsumed beneath 
 the rubric of the homosexual and one can read, by contrast, in the 
 emphatic equations cited earlier as politically antithetical responses 
 to the AIDS epidemic, an insistence on the possibility of recuperating 
 truth, of knowing absolutely, even mathematically, some literal iden¬ 
 tity unmarked by the logic of the supplement or the indeterminacy 
 of the pharmakon. So homophobic and antihomophobic forces alike 
 find themselves producing, as defensive reactions to the social and 
 medical crisis of AIDS, discourses that reify and absolutize identities, 
 discourses that make clear the extent to which both groups see the 
 AIDS epidemic as threatening the social structures through which 
 they have constituted their identities for themselves. 
 
 Of course heterosexual culture in the West has long interpreted 
 homosexuality as a threat to the security or integrity of heterosexual 
 identity. In our dauntingfy inconsistent mythology of homosexuality, 
 “the love that dared not speak its name” was long known as the crime 
 “inter Christianos non nominandum,” and it was so designated not 
 only because it was seen as lurid, shameful, and repellent, but also. 
 
298 Lee Edelman 
 
 and contradictorally, because it was, and is, conceived of as being 
 potentially so attractive that even to speak about it is to risk the 
 possibility of tempting some innocent into a fate too horrible—and 
 too seductive—to imagine. One corollary of this fear of seduction 
 through nomination is the still pervasive homophobic misperception 
 of gay sexuality as contagious—as something one can catch through 
 contact with, for instance, a teacher who is lesbian or gay. Thus even 
 before the historical accident of the outbreak of AIDS in the gay com¬ 
 munities of the West, homosexuality was conceived as a contagion, 
 and the homosexual as parasitic upon the heterosexual community. 
 One chilling instance that may synecdochically evoke the insidious 
 logic behind this homophobic ideology was produced in 1977 in a dis¬ 
 sent written by William Rehnquist, now chief justice of the United 
 States, in response to the Court’s refusal to grant certiorari in the case 
 of Gay Lib v. University of Missouri. As an essay in the Harvard Law 
 Review described the case, “the university had refused to recognize a 
 gay students’ organization on the ground that such recognition would 
 encourage violation of Missouri’s anti-sodomy statute. In support of 
 the university’s position. Justice Rehnquist argued that permitting 
 the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association in 
 this instance would undercut a legitimate state interest, just as per¬ 
 mitting people with the measles to associate freely with others would 
 undercut the states’s interest in imposing a quarantine.”Here, in 
 1977, the ideological configuration of both homosexuality and dis¬ 
 course in relation to disease, and the invocation, albeit in metaphor, 
 of quarantine as an acceptable model for containment, is offered as 
 an argument against the right to produce a nonhomophobic public 
 discourse on homosexuality. 
 
 If such a context suggests the bitter urgency of the activists’ as¬ 
 sertion that Silence = Death, it does not suffice as a reading of the 
 slogan or of the slogan’s relation to the historically specific logic 
 that governs the interimplication of discourse, defense, and disease. 
 For what is striking about Silence = Death as the most widely pub¬ 
 licized, gay-articulated language of response to the AIDS epidemic 
 is its insistence upon the therapeutic property of discourse without 
 specifying in any way what should or must be said. Indeed, as a text 
 produced in response to a medical and political emergency. Silence 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 299 
 
 = Death is stunningly self-reflexive. It takes the form of a rallying 
 cry, but its call for resistance is no call to arms; rather, it calls for the 
 production of discourse, the production of more text, as a mode of 
 defense against the opportunism of medical and legislative responses 
 to the epidemic. But what can be said beyond the need to speak? 
 What discourse can this call to discourse desire? Just what is the dis¬ 
 course of defense that will immunize the gay body politic against the 
 opportunistic infections of demagogic rhetoric? 
 
 An answer to this question can be discerned in Kramer’s accusation: 
 “That all of you . . . continue to refuse to transmit to the public the 
 facts and figures of what is happening daily makes you, in my mind, 
 equal to murderers.” Kramer’s charge explicitly demands the produc¬ 
 tion of texts in order to defend against the transmission of disease. 
 In so doing it makes clear that the defensive discourse is a discourse 
 of “facts and figures,” a discourse that resists the rhetoric of homo- 
 phobic ideologues by articulating a truth that it casts in the form 
 of mathematical or scientific data beyond the disputations of rheto¬ 
 ric. In a similar fashion, the textual prescription offered in Silence = 
 Death takes the form of a formula that implies for it the status of a 
 mathematical axiom, a given, a literal truth that is not susceptible to 
 figural evasions and distortions. In this light, the pink triangle that 
 appears above the slogan in the graphic representations of the text 
 functions not only as an emblem of homosexual oppression, but also, 
 and crucially, as a geometrical shape—a triangle tout court —that 
 produces a sort of cognitive rhyme with the equation mark inscribed 
 in the text, thus reinforcing semiotically the scientific or geometric 
 inevitability of the textual equation. 
 
 At the same time, however, the very formula of mathematical dis¬ 
 course (A = B) that appeals to the prestige of scientific fact evokes 
 the paradigmatic formulation or figure of metaphoric substitution. 
 A = B, after all, is a wholly conventional way of representing the pro¬ 
 cess whereby metaphor improperly designates one thing by employing 
 the name of another. Though Silence = Death is cast in the rhetorical 
 form of geometric equation, and though it invokes, by means of that 
 form, the necessity of articulating a truth of “facts and figures,” the 
 
300 Lee Edelman 
 
 fact remains that the equation takes shape as a figure, that it enacts 
 a metaphorical redefinition of “silence” as “death.” What this means, 
 then, is that the equations that appear to pronounce literal, scien¬ 
 tifically verifiable truth cannot be distinguished from the disavowed 
 literariness of the very figural language those equations undertake to 
 repudiate or exclude. The truth of such equations can only pass for 
 truth so long as we ignore that the literal must itself be produced by 
 a figural sleight of hand. 
 
 The rhetorical form of Silence = Death thereby translates the 
 mathematical into the poetic, the literal into the figural, by framing 
 the call to discourse in terms that evoke the distinctive signature of 
 metaphoric exchange. It would be useful in this context to recall for 
 a moment Harold Bloom’s identification of trope and defense and to 
 cite yet one more equation, this one actually a series of equations pro¬ 
 posed by Bloom in his essay “Freud and the Sublime”: “Literal mean¬ 
 ing equals anteriority equals an earlier state of meaning equals an 
 earlier state of things equals death equals literal meaning.”'® Silence 
 = Death, read in light of this, would gesture metaphorically toward 
 the process of tropological substitution that resists or defends against 
 the literality that Bloom, following Freud, identifies with death and 
 sees as producing the reductive absolutism that informs the reality 
 principle. Indeed, Silence = Death would seem to cast itself as that 
 most heroic of all texts: a text whose metaphoric invocation of tex- 
 tuality, a text whose defensive appeal to discourse would have the 
 power “literally” to counteract the agencies of death by exposing 
 the duplicity inherent in the false equations that pass for “literal” 
 truth and that make possible, as a result, such virulent formulations 
 as Gay Rights = AIDS. In this case, for trope to operate as defense 
 would involve, in part, the repudiation of what passes for the “lit¬ 
 eral truth” of AIDS by attending to the ideological investments that 
 inform the scientific and political discourse about it and by articu¬ 
 lating the inevitable construction of the disease within a massively 
 overdetermined array of figural associations. 
 
 But such a defensive discourse can claim no immunity against con¬ 
 tamination by the figural—a contamination that is nowhere more 
 evident than in its defensive production of the figure of literality, the 
 figure of mathematically precise calculation implicit in the equation 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 301 
 
 Silence = Death. For the politics of language governing the claim of 
 absolute identity in such a formula as Silence = Death aligns that 
 formula, despite its explicitly antihomophobic import, with the logic 
 of natural self-identity implicit in Plato’s binary oppositions, a logic 
 that provides the ideological support for the homophobic terrorism 
 Plato himself endorsed in order to defend the “law of restricting pro- 
 creative intercourse to its natural function by abstention from con¬ 
 gress with our own sex, with its deliberate murder of the race and 
 its wasting of the seed of life on a stony and rocky soil, where it will 
 never take root and bear its natural fruit.”'' 
 
 The proliferating equations that mark the discourse on AIDS, then, 
 suggest that in the face of the terrifying epistemological ambiguity 
 provoked by this epidemic, in the face of so powerful a representation 
 of the force of what we do not know, the figure of certainty, the figure 
 of literality, is itself ideologically constructed and deployed as a de¬ 
 fense, if not as a remedy. (Note one manifestation of this deployment 
 of the figure of knowledge or certainty in the way that political de¬ 
 bate about AIDS in America has been counterproductively fixated on 
 proposals to divert millions of dollars from necessary research toward 
 compulsory testing of various populations for the presence of HIV 
 antibodies. Given the persistence of the identification in America of 
 AIDS with the gay male community, it is hard not to see this fixa¬ 
 tion as part and parcel of the desire to combat uncertainty not only 
 about who has been infected by the so-called “AIDS virus,” but also, 
 and perhaps more deeply and irrationally, about how it is possible 
 to determine who is straight and who is gay.) Precisely because the 
 defensive appeal to literality in a slogan like Silence = Death must 
 produce the literal as a figure of the need and desire for the shel¬ 
 ter of certain knowledge, such a discourse is always necessarily a 
 dangerously contaminated defense—contaminated by the Derridean 
 logic of metaphor so that its attempt to achieve a natural or literal 
 discourse beyond rhetoricity must reproduce the suspect ideology of 
 reified (and threatened) identity marking the reactionary medical 
 and political discourse it would counteract. The discursive logic of 
 Silence = Death thus contributes to the ideologically motivated con¬ 
 fusion of the literal and the figural, the proper and the improper, the 
 inside and the outside, and in the process it recalls the biology of the 
 
302 Lee Edelman 
 
 human immunodeficiency virus as it attacks the mechanism whereby 
 the body is able, in David Black’s words, to distinguish between “Self 
 and Not-Self.” 
 
 HIV, scientists tell us, is a retrovirus that reproduces by a method 
 involving an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. This “allows the 
 virus to copy its genetic information into a form that can be inte¬ 
 grated into the host cell’s own genetic code. Each time a host cell 
 divides, viral copies are produced along with more host cells, each 
 containing the viral code.” At issue in the progress of the disease, 
 then, is the question of inscription and transcription, the question of 
 reproduction and substitution. The virus endangers precisely because 
 it produces a code, or speaks a language, that can usurp or substitute 
 for the genetic discourse of certain cells in the human immune sys¬ 
 tem. AIDS thus inscribes within the biology of the human organism 
 the notion of parasitic transcription. And this metastatic or substitu¬ 
 tive transcription of the cell is particularly difficult to counteract be¬ 
 cause HIV, like metaphor, operates to naturalize, or present as proper, 
 that which is improper or alien or imported from without. Subse¬ 
 quent to the metonymy, the contiguous transmission, of infection, 
 the virus establishes itself as part of the essence or essential material 
 of the invaded cell through a version of metaphoric substitution. It 
 changes the meaning of the cellular code so that each reproduction or 
 articulation of the cell disseminates further the altered genetic mes¬ 
 sage. Moreover, one of the properties of HIV is that it can change 
 the “genetic structure of [the] external proteins” that constitute the 
 outer coat by which the immune system is able to recognize it; thus 
 it can evade the agents of the immune system that attempt to defend 
 against what is alien or improper. Even worse, since HIV attacks the 
 immune system itself, depleting the T -4 or T-helper cells, it prevents 
 the immune system from being able to “recognize foreign substances 
 (antigens) and . . . eliminate them from the body.”*’ Even as it works 
 its tropological wiles within the infected cells, HIV is subverting the 
 capacity of the immune system to read the difference between what 
 is proper to the body, what is “literally” its own, and what is figural 
 or extrinsic. 
 
 But these metaphoric flights of fancy that are at work in the sci¬ 
 entific discourse on AIDS, just as they are at work in my own meta- 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 303 
 
 phorizing discourse, the flights of fancy in which the failures of dis¬ 
 course as defense are already inscribed within disease, have no literal 
 warrant in “nature.” Reverse transcriptase and immune defense sys¬ 
 tems are metaphoric designations that determine the way we under¬ 
 stand the operations of the body; they are readings that metastasize 
 the metabolic by infecting it with a strain of metaphor that can ap¬ 
 pear to be so natural, so intrinsic to our way of thinking, that we 
 mistake it for the literal truth of the body, as if our rhetorical immune 
 system were no longer operating properly, or as if the virus that is 
 metaphor had mutated so successfully as to evade the antibodies that 
 would differentiate between the inside and the outside, between the 
 proper and the improper. This once again brings to mind Derrida’s 
 analysis of the parasitic relation of writing to Plato’s living word of 
 speech: “In order to cure the latter of the pharmakon and rid it of the 
 parasite, it is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To 
 keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of ‘logic’ itself, of 
 good ‘sense’ insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which 
 is: being is what it is, the outside is outside and the inside inside.” “ 
 But since, as Derrida says, “metaphoricity is the logic of contamina¬ 
 tion and the contamination of logic,” no discourse can ever achieve 
 the logic of self-identity, the logic of scientific equations, without the 
 infection of metaphor that finds the enemy or alien always already 
 within. As Emily Dickinson declared in anticipation of Derrida’s 
 reading of the pharmakon, “infection in the sentence breeds.”^' And 
 in the case of AIDS, infection endlessly breeds sentences—sentences 
 whose implication in a poisonous history of homophobic construc¬ 
 tions assures that no matter what explicit ideology they serve, they 
 will carry within them the virulent germ of the dominant cultural 
 discourse. 
 
 If my conclusion presents the somber circularity of Discourse = 
 Defense = Disease = Discourse, 1 cannot conclude without trying 
 to locate the zone of infection within these remarks. What 1 have 
 been suggesting is that any discourse on AIDS must inscribe itself in 
 a volatile and uncontrollable field of metaphoric contention in which 
 its language will necessarily find itself at once appropriating AIDS for 
 its own tendentious purposes and becoming subject to appropriation 
 by the contradictory logic of homophobic ideology. This essay is not 
 
304 Lee Edelman 
 
 exempt from those necessities. As much as I would insist on the value 
 and urgency of examining the figural inscriptions of AIDS, 1 am suffi¬ 
 ciently susceptible to the gravity of the literal to feel uneasy, as a gay 
 man, about producing a discourse in which the horrors experienced 
 by my own community, along with other communities in America 
 and abroad, become the material for intellectual arabesques that in¬ 
 scribe those horrors within the neutralizing conventions of literary 
 criticism. Yet as painfully as my own investment in the figure of lit- 
 erality evokes for me the profound inhumanity implicit in this figural 
 discourse on AIDS, 1 am also aware that any discourse on AIDS must 
 inevitably reproduce that tendentious figurality. At the same time, 
 1 would argue that the appeal of the literal can be an equally dan¬ 
 gerous seduction; it is, after all, the citation of the pressing literality 
 of the epidemic with its allegedly “literal” identification of homo¬ 
 sexuality and disease, that fuels the homophobic responses to AIDS 
 and demands that we renounce what are blithely dismissed as figu¬ 
 ral embellishments upon the “real,” material necessities of human 
 survival—embellishments such as civil rights and equal protection 
 under the law. We must be as wary, then, of the temptations of the 
 literal as we are of the ideologies at work in the figural: for discourse, 
 alas, is the only defense with which we can counteract discourse, and 
 there is no available discourse on AIDS that is not itself diseased. 
 
 Notes 
 
 The earliest version of this essay was presented at a session on “The Literature of 
 AIDS” at the 1987 MLA Convention. I would like to thank Michael Cadden and Elaine 
 Showalter, the other panelists, for offering helpful suggestions. In revised form the 
 essay was delivered at Bowdoin College and 1 am happy to thank those who sponsored 
 me there, the Lesbian/Gay/Straight Alliance and the Bowdoin Literary Society. Finally 
 I want to express my gratitude to Joseph Litvak for his invaluable assistance. 
 
 1 Lee Grove, "The Metaphor of AIDS,” Boston Globe Magazine. 28 February 1988. 
 
 2 David Black, The Plague Years: A Chronicle of AIDS, the Epidemic of Our Times 
 (New York, 1986), 80. 
 
 3 H. D., Tribute to Freud (Boston, 1974), 86. 
 
 4 Johns Hopkins University, Population Information Program, "Issues in World 
 Health,” Population Reports, series 50, no. 14 (1986): 198. 
 
 5 Plato, "Timaeus,” in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford, 
 1953). 3: 89. 
 
Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS 305 
 
 6 Jacques Derrida, “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson 
 (Chicago, 1981), 101. 
 
 7 Ibid., 79. 
 
 8 Ibid., 149. 
 
 9 Cited in Black, Plague Years, 17-18. 
 
 10 Ibid., 30. 
 
 11 Frances Fitzgerald, “The Castro—II,” New Yorker, 28July 1986, 50. 
 
 12 William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson, and Robert C. Kolodny, “Sex in the Age 
 of AIDS,” Newsweek, 14 March 1988, 48. 
 
 13 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 149. 
 
 14 Ibid., 153. 
 
 15 “The Constitutional Status of Sexual Orientation; Homosexuality as a Suspect 
 Classification,” Harvard Law Review 98 (1985): 1294. 
 
 16 Harold Bloom, “Freud and the Sublime," in Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism 
 (New York, 1982), 107. 
 
 17 Cited in Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 152-53. 
 
 18 Johns Hopkins University, “Issues in World Health,” 198. 
 
 19 Ibid. 
 
 20 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 128. 
 
 21 Emily Dickinson, “A Word Dropped Careless on a Page,” in The Complete Poems 
 of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston, i960), 553. 
 
v3 > ‘ 
 
 !•' V ; " 'i 
 
 
 • • 4 ' • • 
 
 ''i 
 
 '" '"i ■ ■ 
 
 % i 
 
 ^ I ' • F . *. ' •' 
 
 ib 
 
 ^•uStit]^, . .^■’ i-V.^iu '' *■ 
 
 •-»i ,.' • ' !((#■/jV ''' 
 
 fe<4' A'!i4nliWf4i 
 
 f '>‘4 '>■ ((^ ■■ 7 ' 4 ji 
 
 El 
 
 itl >■ ■ v* 
 
 #• 
 
 
 "■ .'■' . "■-T-,. 
 
 t ■:••;■■• V** ■■';■ ^V^ fl •l4V*‘i>‘3fl^?''Jij 
 
 ; .r .,4 4 4 >, ( , 
 
Notes on Contributors 
 
 Joseph A. Boone, Associate Professor of English at Harvard Univer¬ 
 sity, is the author of Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of 
 Fiction (1987) and is working on a companion volume. Sexuality and 
 Narrative: Issues in the Psychology of Sex and Self in Modern Fiction 
 (forthcoming, Chicago). 
 
 Ronald R. Butters is Associate Professor of English at Duke Univer¬ 
 sity. He is editor of American Speech, the journal of the American 
 Dialect Society, and has published extensively on social and regional 
 variation in contemporary English. 
 
 Robert L. Caserio is Associate Professor of English at the University 
 of Utah and co-director of the university’s Humanities Center. He is 
 the author of Plot, Story, and the Novel (1979). His recent essays have 
 appeared in Antaeus, Grand Street, and Novel; and he is at work on 
 The British Novel since Conrad: Theory and History. 
 
 John M. Clum is Associate Professor of English and Professor of the 
 Practice of Theater at Duke University. His recent essays are on gen¬ 
 der politics in contemporary drama and film. 
 
 Ed Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University. He 
 is currently completing a manuscript entitled “Talk on the Wilde 
 Side: Towards a Genealogy of the Discourse on Male Sexuality” from 
 which the current essay is taken. His articles have recently appeared 
 in several places, including The Nation and Clio; his PM LA article 
 received the MLA’s 1987 Crompton-Noll prize. 
 
 William A. Cohen is a graduate student in English at the University 
 of California, Berkeley. 
 
 Lee Edelman is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University and 
 the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of 
 Rhetoric and Desire (1987). He is currently working on Homographe- 
 sis, a study of lesbian and gay literature and literary theory. 
 
 Jonathan Goldberg is Sir William Osier Professor of English Litera¬ 
 ture at the Johns Hopkins University; his most recent book is Voice 
 Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (1986). 
 
308 Notes on Contributors 
 
 John R. Leo teaches literature, theory, and communications at the 
 University of Rhode Island, where he is Associate Professor of En¬ 
 glish. He was founder and is area chair of the Gay and Lesbian Studies 
 Section of the American Culture Association and has published 
 widely on media, theory, and American studies. 
 
 Michael Moon is completing a book on the first four editions of 
 Leaves of Grass as cultural critique. He teaches American literature 
 at Duke University. 
 
 Stephen Orgel is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities 
 at Stanford University. His books include The Jonsonian Masque, The 
 Illusion of Tower, and, in collaboration with Sir Roy Strong, Inigo 
 Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. His edition of The Tempest 
 for the Oxford Shakespeare series has recently appeared, and he is 
 currently editing The Winter’s Tale in the same series. 
 
 Joseph A. Porter is the author of The Drama of Speech Acts: Shake¬ 
 speare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy (1979), Shakespeare’s Mercutio: His 
 History and Drama (Chapel Hill, 1988), and articles on Shakespeare 
 and speech-act theory. He teaches at Duke University. 
 
 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Professor of English at Duke, is the author 
 of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and 
 the forthcoming Epistemology of the Closet. 
 
Author Index 
 
 Acker, Kathy, 49 
 Alcibiades, 23 
 Alcott, Louisa May, 246 
 Aldington, Richard, 231 n. 23 
 Alger, Horatio, 238, 240, 245-48, 250, 252 
 n. 19 
 
 Althusser, Louis, 257 
 Andrews, Terry, 258, 260, 262, 265, 
 274-83 
 
 Aretino, Pietro, 23 
 Ascham, Roger, 122 
 Assheton-Cross, Sir R., 191-92 
 Attallah, Paul, 50 nn. 13, 17 
 
 Bahlman, Dudley, 181-82, 201 nn. 25, 27, 
 and 28, 202 n. 31 
 Bailey, Paul, 166 n. 2 
 Baines, Richard, 128-29 
 Bales, Jack, 252 n. 19 
 Balzac, Honore de, 44 
 Barish, Jonas, 15 
 Barker, Francis, 50 n. 22 
 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 252 n. ii 
 Barnfield, Richard, 112-14, *29 
 Baron, Dennis, 3 
 Barrett, Michele, 50 n. 10 
 Barthes, Roland, 32, 41, 231 n. 26 
 Barton, Lee, 166 n. i 
 Bataille, Andre, 49, 279 
 Beckett, Samuel, 257 
 Beckson, Karl, 232 n. 39 
 Bentley, G. E., 28 n. 2 
 Berger, Harry, Jr., ni, 125 n. 23 
 Bersani, Leo, 68 
 Bill, Alfred H., 252 n. 9 
 Black, David, 292, 296, 302 
 Blackmun, Harry Andrew, 261-64, 268, 
 276 
 
 Blackstone, Sir William, 185-87, 189 
 Block, Adam, 50 n. 20 
 Bloom, Harold, 300 
 Boswell, John, 200 nn. 6, 10 
 Bray, Alan, 19-20, 111-14, 118, 126 n. 36, 
 128, 146 n. 3, 177-78, 200 n. 5, 201 
 n. 19, 202 n. 32 
 
 Brooke, Arthur, 133 
 Brooke, Nicholas, 134 
 Brown, Charles Brockden, 237 
 Browne, Nick, 32 
 Butler, Samuel, 229 
 
 Carpenter, Frederic Ives, 126 n. 33 
 Casaubon, Isaac, 29 n. 19 
 Cather, Willa, 6t-66, 68-71 
 Caulfield, Deborah, 50 n. 18 
 Chapman, George, 126 n. 36 
 Chapman, R. T., 103 n. 1 
 Cheesboro, James W., 5 n. 12 
 Chester, Lewis, 205 nn. 57, 59 
 Clarke, Edward, 220 
 Cohen, Ed, 200 n. 2, 204 n. 46 
 Coke, Sir Edward, 174-77, 186 
 Colman, E. A. M., 141, 144-45, i 47 
 nn. 14, 17 
 
 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 66 
 Conrad, Joseph, 260 
 Cooper, James Fenimore, 237, 250 
 Crew, Louie, 1 
 
 Croft-Cooke, Rupert, 222, 231 n. 23 
 Crompton, Louis, 176 
 Curtin, Kaier, 50 n. 11 
 
 Davidson, Cathy, 236 
 de Certeau, Michel, 50 n. 8 
 Dekker, Thomas, 9 
 de la Garza, Mauricio Gonzalez, 240 
 de Lauretis, Teresa, 105 n. 27 
 Denning, Michael, 252 n. 17 
 Derrida, Jacques, 123, 294-95, 297, 303, 
 305 n. 17 
 
 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds, 2 
 Dickens, Charles, 256, 259, 274, 283 
 Dickinson, Emily, 303 
 Disney, John, 182 
 Donne, John, 289 
 Doolittle, Hilda, 293-94 
 Douglas, Ann, 236 
 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 229 
 Drinnon, Richard, 252 n. 9 
 Dryden, John, 139 
 
310 Author Index 
 
 Dukakis, Michael, 272 
 Durrell, Lawrence, 73-106 
 Duthie, George Ian, 143-44 
 Dyer, Richard, 49 n. 5 
 Dynes, Wayne, 5 n. 13 
 
 Eagleton, Terry, 257, 259-60 
 E. K., 23, 107-26 
 Eliot, T. S., 260 
 
 Ellis, Havelock, 169-70, 172, 233 n. 43 
 Ellis, John, 38, 44, 47 
 Ellmann, Richard, 200 n. 2, 230 n. 18, 232 
 n. 30 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 292 
 Erasmus, iio-ii, 113, 120, 122-23 
 Evans, G. Blakemore, 140, 147 n. 19 
 
 Farmer, John Stephen, 143 
 
 Faulkner, William, 73, 237 
 
 Feuer, Jane, 50 n. 15 
 
 Fiedler, Leslie, 235-37 
 
 Finch, Mark, 49 n. 3 
 
 Fineman, Joel, 230 n. 5 
 
 Fitzgerald, Frances, 296 
 
 Flaubert, Gustave, 80-83, 91. 100-102 
 
 Foucault, Michel, 33, 43, 59, 113, 172, 
 
 182, 200 nn, 7, 9, 201 nn. 14, 16, and 
 20, 257 
 
 Fraser, G. S., 77 
 Freeman, William, 233 n. 47 
 Freud, Sigmund, 42, 61, 79, 92, 99, 279, 
 281, 293-94, 300 
 Friedlander, Benedict, 59-60 
 Friedman, Alan Warren, 106 n. 49 
 
 Gagnier, Reginia, 232 n. 32, 233 n. 47 
 Galen, 13 
 
 Garber, Marjorie, 132 
 Genet, Jean, 248 
 Gentleman, Francis, 139 
 Gibbons, Brian, 147 n. 13 
 Gide, Andre, 259 
 Gigeroff, Alex K., 186 
 Gilman, Sander L,, 91 
 Gluckman, Max, 193 
 Goldberg, Jonathan, 124 n. 15, 125 n. 22, 
 128 
 
 Goldman, Michael, 129-30 
 
 Goodich, Michael, 173 
 Graham, Sylvester, 242 
 Grahn, Judy, 66 
 Gray, Simon, 160 
 
 Greenblatt, Stephen, 17-18, 27, 28 n. 3, 
 
 137 
 
 Grosskurth, Phylis, 200 n, 3 
 Grove, Lee, 289-90 
 Grover, Jan Zita, 3 
 Guerard, Albert J,, 73 
 
 Hall, Stuart, 51 n. 27 
 Halliwell, James, 2 
 Halperin, David M., 124 n, 5 
 Hands, Terry, 140 
 Hartley, John, 31, 35, 41, 46 
 Harvey, A, D,, 187 
 Harvey, Gabriel, 23, 115-24 
 Hathaway, James D., 284-85 
 Hauser, Marianne, 258, 260, 262, 265, 
 269-75 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 237, 253 n. 25 
 H. D. See Doolittle, Hilda 
 Hebdige, Dick, 51 n. 27 
 Henley, William Ernest, 143 
 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 59 
 Hobson, Laura Z., 40-45 
 Hocquenghem, Guy, 277-79 
 Holloway, Robert, 204 n. 45 
 Hosley, Richard, 143 
 Howard. Lawrence, 284-85 
 Howell, Robert J., 286 n. 21 
 Howells, William Dean, 250 
 Hutchinson, Lucy, 21 
 Hyde, H. Montgomery, 199 n. 2, 200 
 nn. 5, 10, and 12, 205 n. 57, 232 nn. 28- 
 29, 233 nn. 43, 45 
 
 Irigaray, Luce, 85 
 
 James I, 21-22, 25-26, 29 n. 19 
 James, Henry, 66-67, 238, 240, 244, 
 246-50 
 
 James, Henry, Sr,, 249 
 Jameson, Fredric, 33, 43-44, 257 
 Jardine, Alice, 84, 106 n. 55 
 Jehl, Douglas. 286 n. 14 
 Jenkins, Harold, 146 n, 6 
 
Author Index 311 
 
 Johannsen, Robert W., 251 n. 9 
 Johnson, Virginia E., 296 
 jonson, Ben, 9, 19 
 Jorgens, Jack J., 141 
 Joyce, James, 73, 78-79 
 
 Kahn, Coppelia, 142-43 
 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 201 n. 13 
 Katz, Jonathan Ned, 71 n. 2 
 Kemp, Jack, 264 
 Kenner, Hugh, 246 
 Kerr, Paul, 50 n. 15 
 Kleber, David J., 286 n. 21 
 Knowlton, Charles, 242 
 Kokeritz, Helge, 143 
 Kolodny, Annette, 236 
 Kolodny, Robert C., 305 n. 12 
 Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 42, 171 
 Kramer, Larry, 296, 299 
 
 Lacan, Jacques, 123, 125 n. 23, 217, 
 223-24, 236 
 Lacy, John, 201 n. 26 
 Laermer, Richard, 50 n. n 
 Lafitte, Francois, 204 n. 50 
 Laqueur, Thomas, 28 n. 3 
 Lawrence, D. H., 73, 91, 236 
 Leitch, David, 205 nn. 57, 59 
 Lentricchia, Frank, 49 n. 5 
 Leo, John R., 51 n. 31 
 Levenson, Jill L., 147 n. 16 
 Levin, Richard, 141-42 
 Levine, Laura, 16 
 Levitt, Morton P., 103 n. 6 
 Litz, Walton, 73 
 Lockyer, Roger, 29 n. 23 
 Loti, Pierre, 248 
 Lucian, 23 
 
 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, 33, 46-49 
 
 Macherey, Pierre, 257 
 McIntosh, Mary, 50 n. 10 
 Maclean, Ian, 14, 28 n. 3 
 Mager, Donald, 59 
 Marc, David, 36, 39 
 
 Marlowe, Christopher, 22-26, 112, 127-47 
 Marotti, Arthur, 125 n. 27 
 Marshall, Arthur Calder, 200 n. 3 
 
 Martin, Robert K., 236-37 
 Mason, Stuart, 205 n. 60, 231 nn. 24, 27, 
 232 n. 39 
 
 Masters, William H., 296 
 Mans, Katharine, 18 
 Medhurst, Andy, 49 n. 5 
 Melville, Herman, 237, 240 
 Mercer, Colin, 51 n. 26 
 Merrick, Gordon, 98 
 Michelangelo, 221, 228 
 Middleton, Thomas, 9, 19, 126 n. 36 
 Miller, D. A., 124 n. 18, 232 n. 31, 255, 
 258-59, 270, 281 
 Miller, Henry, 75-77 
 Montaigne, Michel, 228 
 Montgomery, Kathryn, 36-38 
 Murray, Isobel, 231 n. 23 
 
 Newmeyer, Frederick J., 3 
 Newton, Esther, 66 
 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49 
 Nissenbaum, Stephen, 242 
 Norris, William, 265-69 
 Norton, Rictor, i 
 
 Ovid, 16 
 
 Owen, Robert Dale, 241-42 
 
 Parke, Ernest, 196-97 
 Partridge, Eric, 144-45, <47 n. 14 
 Peel, Robert, 188-89 
 Pequigney, Joseph, 131, 145 
 Perkins, William, 15 
 Pinchin, Jane L., 104 nn. 10, ii, and 13, 
 106 nn. 50-51 
 
 Plato, 221, 293-95, 297, 301, 303 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 217, 232 n. 35, 237 
 Porter, Joseph, 146 n. 8, 147 n. 15 
 Porter, Katherine Anne, 62 
 Proust, Marcel, 66-68, 259 
 Prynne, William, 16-17 
 
 Rader, Dotson, 150, 166 n. 5 
 
 Radzinowicz, Sir Leon, 186-87, 203 n. 42 
 
 Rainolds, John, 16-17 
 
 Read, Allen Walker, 2 
 
 Reeves, John, 200 n. ii 
 
 Rehnquist, William, 298 
 
312 Author Index 
 
 Reinhardt, Stephen, 266-67, 269 
 Renault, Mary, 66 
 Rich, Adrienne, 60 
 Roche, Regina Maria, 250 
 Rodgers, Bruce, 3 
 Rousseau, George, 203 n. 37 
 Rubenstein, Frankie, 147 n. 14 
 Rubin, Gayle, 53, 56, 66 
 Russ, Joanna, 66 
 
 Said, Edward, 80-81, 100, 104 nn. 14, 24, 
 105 n. 26 
 St. John, 112 
 Sand, George, 250 
 Sartre, jean-Paul, 104 n. 23 
 Saul, John, 196 
 Schama, Simon, 28 n. i 
 Scharnhorst, Gary, 252 n. 19 
 Schoppe, Caspar (Scoppius), 29 n. 19 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 250 
 Seaman, Donald, 204 n. 55 
 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 9, 25, 76-77, 105 
 n. 37, 112, 115, 124 n. 14, 125 n. 23, 128, 
 131, 232 n. 38, 233 n. 43, 236, 250 
 Shakespeare, William, 7-29, 109-10, 123, 
 126 n. 36, 127-47, 207-33 
 Shapiro, Fred R., 5 n. 7 
 Shapiro, Michael J., 3 
 Sharp, Ronald A., 146 n. ii 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 125 n. 27 
 Siegel, Sandra, 231 n. 21 
 Simpson, Colin, 205 nn. 57, 59 
 Sklepowitch, Edward A., 149-50 
 Smith, F. B., 204 n. 50 
 Smith, Henry Nash, 251 n. 9 
 Smitherman-Donaldson, Geneva, 5 n. 6 
 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 236, 238, 243, 
 252 n. II 
 
 Socrates, 16, 23, no 
 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 33-34 
 Sontag, Susan, 66 
 Spears, Richard, 3 
 Spenser, Edmund, 22-23, 107-26 
 Spoto, Donald, 157, 165, 166 nn. 6, 7, 
 and 9 
 
 Stanley, Julia Penelope, 3, 5 n. 7 
 Stansell, Christine, 238-39 
 
 Stead, William, 191 
 Steegmuller, Francis, 104 n. 23 
 Steiner, George, 237 
 Stephen, Sir James, 200 n. ii 
 Stern, Madeleine B., 252 n. 18 
 Stern, Virginia, 125 n. 28 
 Stubbes, Philip, 15, 17 
 
 Tannen, Deborah, 3 
 Taylor, Chet, 105 n. 28 
 Thompson, Roger, 244 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 240 
 Tibbits-Kleber, Alta Lura, 286 n. 21 
 Todd, Rev. John, 242 
 Tompkins, Jane, 236 
 Traubel, Horace, 253 nn. 22, 23, and 25 
 Trilling, Lionel, 237 
 Trumbach, Randolph, 201 n. 24, 202 
 n. 32, 203 n. 35, 204 n. 45 
 Turler, Jerome, 119 
 Turner, Victor, 133, 192-93 
 Twain, Mark, 237 
 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 229 
 
 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 42 
 
 Vahimagi, Tise, 50 n. 15 
 Van Dijk, Teun A., 5 n. 6 
 Veyne, Paul, 113, 124 n. 5 
 Virgil, 23, 107-13, 118, 125 n. 19 
 
 Walkowitz, Judith, 204 nn. 51-52 
 Walters, Ronald G., 252 n. ii 
 Weeks, Jeffrey, 50 n. 9, 200 n. 3 
 Wharton, Edith, 248, 253 n. 22 
 White, Byron, 261-64, 268-69 
 Whitman, Walt, 4, 235-53 
 Wilde, Oscar, 62-64, 169-72, 194, 197-98, 
 207-33, 259 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, and Others, 233 n. 42 
 Wilentz, Sean, 241 
 Williams, Tennessee, 149-67 
 Wilson, Colin, 204 n. 55 
 Wilson, John Dover, 143-44 
 Wingrove, David, 105 n. 34 
 Wister, Owen, 248-49 
 Woodward, Josiah, 181 
 
Author Index 313 
 
 Woodward, Samuel B., 242 Wright, Thomas, 14 
 
 Woodward, William Harrison, 124 n. 8, 
 
 126 nn. 37, 39, and 41 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 66 
 
 Wren, Robert M., 126 n. 36 
 
 Wright, Frances, 241-42 Zeffirelli, Franco, 139-41 
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 Displacing homophobia : gay male perspectives in 
 literature and culture / edited by Ronald R. Butters, 
 John M. Clum, and Michael Moon, 
 p. cm. 
 
 Essays originally published in the winter 1989 issue of 
 the South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 88, no. i. 
 
 Includes bibliographical references. 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-0962-9 (alk. paper). — isbn 0-8223-0970-X 
 (pbk. : alk. paper) 
 
 I. Men in literature. 2. American literature—History 
 and criticism. 3. English literature—History and 
 criticism. 4. Sex roles in literature. 
 
 5. Homosexuality and literature. 6. Homosexuality, 
 Male. I. Butters, Ronald R. ii. Clum, John M. 
 
 III. Moon, Michael, iv. Title: Gay male 
 perspectives in literature and culture. 
 
 PS173.M36D5 1989 
 
 8io. 9'353—dc20 89-27584 
 
cS <r-7? 
 
 
DUKE UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 
 27706