The Medicalization of Sexuality in Twentieth-Century

THE MEDICALIZATION OF SEXUALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY

AMERICAN LESBIAN-IDENTIFIED LITERATURE

CAROL ANNE LITTLE

Thesis

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the Degree of Master of Arts (English)

Acadia University

Fall Graduation 2013

This thesis by CAROL ANNE LITTLE was defended successfully in an oral examination on September 6, 2013.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

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Dr. Diane Holmberg, Chair

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Dr. Ann Braithwaite, External Reader

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Dr. Lisa Narbeshuber, Internal Reader

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Dr. Anne Quéma, Supervisor

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Dr. John Eustace, Head of the Department

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This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English).

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I, CAROL ANNE LITTLE, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

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Author

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Supervisor

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Date

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER ONE ...... 12 A HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF SEXUALITY CHAPTER TWO ...... 40 LESBIAN-IDENTIFIED LITERATURE A) 1930s / DJUNA BARNES NIGHTWOOD ...... 45 B) 1950s / VIN PACKER SPRING FIRE ...... 61 C) 1970s / RITA MAE BROWN RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE ...... 75 CHAPTER THREE ...... 86 CENSORSHIP – LITERATURE AND FILM CHAPTER FOUR ...... 95 CONCLUSIONS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE AND FILM, DSM CHANGES, AND TRANSEXUALITY WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED...... 101

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore the relationship between twentieth-century American lesbian- identified literature, medicine and psychology. My primary literary texts are Djuna

Barnes’ Nightwood (1937), Vin Packer’s Spring Fire (1952), and Rita Mae Brown’s

Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). I engage with theories relating to medicine, sexuality, and power by Michel Foucault, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Judith Butler to demonstrate that the construction of homosexuality as a disease, as “other,” and as “deviant” throughout the twentieth century has had significant social and historical repercussions. I begin by examining the historical practice of medicalizing sexuality through the works of key philosophers, theorists, and medical practitioners, then move to explore the ways in which Barnes, Packer, and Brown incorporate and appropriate medical discourses of the time in order to highlight their inherent flaws and promote justice and equality for homosexuals. In addition to literature, I also briefly examine the ways in which other media, in particular films by director Alfred Hitchcock that feature queer protagonists, function within rigid censorship laws and amid pathologizing medical discourse. By studying both American literature and film from the twentieth century, I am able to take a broader view of the scope of authoritarian discipline and control over sexuality in the

United States.

INTRODUCTION

We have been the silent minority, the silenced minority—invisible

women, invisible men. Early on, the alleged enormity of our “sin” justified

the denial of our existence, even our physical destruction. Our “crime”

was not merely against society, not only against humanity, but “against

nature”—we were outlaws against the universe. Long did we remain

literally and metaphorically unspeakable, “among Christians not to be

named”—nameless. (Jonathan Katz Gay American History 1)

The medicalization of women and homosexuality has influenced lesbian representation in twentieth-century American literature and film. The primary literary texts for my thesis exploring the connections between lesbian-identified literature and its relationship to medicine and psychology will be Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1937), Vin

Packer’s Spring Fire (1952), and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). These novels represent a cross-section of publication periods with associated shifting medical theories and varying literary styles across the twentieth century. I will use these texts to demonstrate the ways in which “deviant” sexuality has traditionally been pathologized by the medical community, how this disease model is interpreted and appropriated in arts such as literature and film, and how it functions to negatively cast homosexuality as a burdensome illness. Leonore Tiefer identifies medicalization as a

major social and intellectual trend whereby medicine, with its distinctive

ways of thinking, its models, metaphors, values, agents, and institutions, 2

comes to exercise practical and theoretical authority over particular areas

of life. Medicalization relocates activities or experiences (e.g., crimes,

habits, or changes in physical or intellectual ability) from categories such

as social deviance or ordinary aging to categories of medical expertise and

dominion. (253)

Through an examination of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American medical discourses and developing psychological theories relating to homosexuality in general and lesbianism in particular, we can trace trends that associate homosexuality with disease, criminality, and abnormality. As Michel Foucault argues in his lecture series from the 1970s, “for a long time, medicine, psychiatry, penal justice, and criminology remained, and to a large extent remain still today, on the borders of a manifestation of truth in accordance with the norms of knowledge and of a production of truth in the form of the test, the latter always tending to hide behind and get its justification from the former” (Psychiatric 335). So, if the medical, psychiatric, and legal communities deem homosexuality to be an expression of abnormality, illness, or of a mental defect, we can expect to see this category of frightening, possibly contagious,

“disease” manifest in art and literature.

The ways that we naturalize heterosexuality, and present it as the normal sexuality function to create a discourse that supports the disease model of homosexuality.

Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between homosexuality and medicine relates to his theory of the panopticon by suggesting that medical discourse on sexuality can promote a form of internalized surveillance and discipline in which individuals police their own sexuality and the sexuality of others. This type of internalized surveillance is marked 3 within the normative American family structure wherein, especially in the twentieth century, a focus on the nuclear heterosexual family, its moral instruction, and

“appropriate” division of gender roles is evident. In his lecture series on abnormality and psychiatric power, , Foucault refers to sexual psychopathology, and explores how psychological discourses can function to control sexuality. He writes that “psychiatric power is above all a certain way of managing, of administering, before being a cure or therapeutic intervention: it is a regime” (173). Viewed in this light, the psychiatric diagnosis of homosexuality as a disease is a way in which to discipline human behaviours whereby individuals are taught to desire to conform to the socially and medically accepted behaviours. Foucault furthers this idea of the psychiatric regime by explaining how, in a family, for example,

we would see how the vigilant family eye, or, if you like, family

sovereignty, gradually came to resemble the disciplinary form. The

watchful family eye became a psychiatric gaze, or, at any rate, a psycho-

pathological, a psychological gaze. Supervision of the child became

supervision in the form of deciding on the normal and the abnormal; one

began to keep an eye on the child’s behavior, character, and sexuality, and

it is here that we see the emergence of precisely all that psychologization

of the child within the family itself. (Psychiatric 124)

Fear-motivated compliance functions as a deterrent from engaging in undesirable behaviours, especially when this type of binary view of the acceptable expression of sexuality is promoted within the family structure at home. It is more difficult for children, who live essentially helpless to the doctrine of their guardians, to accept their sexual 4 orientation if they are being taught at home that the way they feel is wrong or unnatural.

Often, for example, if a young child’s family attends a religious ceremony, the child is also expected to attend and identify with the associated religious culture. So, when a homosexual child is raised in a family structure that outspokenly deems homosexuality to be undesirable, punishable, and diseased, the chances that the child will internalize these same opinions are high.

It is critical to examine literary texts that contain homosexual characters and explore the ways in which they, and the medical discourses that inform their construction, can actually promote hetero-patriarchy as the expected, or normal, organization of sex, gender, and desire. Arguably, some homosexual characters in twentieth-century novels, despite the authors’ potential intention to promote lesbian or gay identity as valid, can instead promote medical theories and negative stereotypes that raise heterosexuality as the ideal or normal sexuality. Judith Butler points out that we should “consider the way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself through setting up certain illusions of continuity between sex, gender, and desire” (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” 317). One can view multiple examples daily in which this illusory continuity is insinuated and upheld in common exchanges such as asking a female teenager if she has a boyfriend, or in advertisements for jewelry sales which target males to purchase rings for females. This type of assumption that sex, gender, and desire follow a natural path functions to uphold a hetero-patriarchal psychiatric regime, to conceal any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality, and can cause confusion, depression, and anxiety in individuals whose sexual orientation or gender do not align with what is continually promoted as normal or socially desirable. 5

In the study of sexual orientation as represented in literature, one ought to consider the ways in which sexuality is portrayed, and what that portrayal, in turn, promotes. Current scholars rarely view sexuality as simply a preference since this line of thinking undeniably strips homosexuals of the right to view sexual orientation as inherent to their identity—if it is reduced to simply a choice, sexuality is denied its importance and is relegated to the stature of a fashion decision. After all, one would not argue that race or religion could be categorized as a lifestyle, choice, or preference, since to do so would be offensive to the individual who gains esteem, culture, and community associated with that identity. In her groundbreaking article from 1980, “Compulsory

Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich writes that “any theory or cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less ‘natural’ phenomenon, as mere ‘sexual preference,’ or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations, is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions” (632). Rich’s statement is crucial to the examination of fictional representations of lesbian characters. Her theory draws our attention to the fact that mere representation of variable sexuality may not be enough, and could actually be harmful or promote negative stereotypes. If homosexuals are only represented as people who are saddled with a mental illness that causes them to be a threat to decent society, this not only promotes the belief in individuals who do not identify as homosexual that queer people are sick, but it can re-enforce this idea in homosexuals themselves. Hence, the exclusively negative portrayal of homosexuality can lead to internalized homophobia, self-hatred, shame, and anxiety in gay- and lesbian-identified people. Therefore, through taking an analysis of Rich’s work another step further, one can conclude that in their 6 promotion of the “homosexual as sick” medical theories may lead and contribute to queer individuals displaying symptoms of psychological distress as a result of being an oppressed minority who are essentially taught that they are morally or mentally ill.

The type of social control and policing that Foucault discusses begins with labeling and categorizing characteristics or behaviours as normal or abnormal. This is especially evident when law and medicine become involved, as they have with classification of sexuality, since moral judgment, enforcement, and control measures often ensue. Jeffrey Weeks examines the ways in which the medicalization of homosexuality has affected queer individuals throughout American history. Weeks states that

the practice of social labelling of homosexuals as having a deviant

condition operates as a mechanism of control in two ways:

1. It helps to provide a clear-cut threshold between permissible and

forbidden behaviour, preventing drift into deviant behaviour by creating

the likelihood that a small step will lead to a total fall into a deviant role.

2. It serves to segregate the deviants from others, thus containing deviant

practices within a relatively narrow group. (Making Sexual History 56)

This type of social control pervades all areas of an individual’s life—employment, family, and home. One can understand how instinctive it would be for individuals to hide their “deviant” sexual desires from family, close friends, even lovers when the consequences of disclosing an affinity for the “wrong” kind of sexuality could lead to the loss of friends, family, employment, freedom, and even respect. 7

Over the last two centuries, medical science has rocketed into a position of power and influence to the point that it has become commonplace to hear reference to medical statistics on a nearly daily basis. As Susan Stryker points out, “since the end of the eighteenth century, science has gradually come to replace religion as the highest social authority; since the middle of the nineteenth century, medical science has played an increasingly central role in defining everyday life” (Transgender History 36). North

Americans regularly look to the research of physicians and psychologists to inform and guide them in matters from the simple to complex such as basic nutrition, child rearing methods, early intervention, and treatment of major and minor mental and physical diseases. It is not unusual, then, that we have looked to medical science to also provide curative measures for perceived societal ills. Stryker states that “medical practitioners and institutions have the social power to determine what is considered sick or healthy, normal or pathological, sane or insane—and thus, often, to transform potentially neutral forms of human difference into unjust and oppressive social hierarchies” (Transgender History

36). Stryker’s words echo Foucault’s assertion that medicine and psychiatry represent a regime of power and truth. Medicine has become such a trusted and respected branch of science partly because of the power and knowledge that physicians are maintained to control. North Americans have arguably come to depend on medicine as a young child would on a parent.

It is therefore imperative that we examine and learn from the effects of medicalizing individual characteristics and behaviours revolving around sexuality. One of

Michel Foucault’s most important philosophical contributions “was his injunction to see sexuality as itself an historically specific discursive formation, with effects in the real 8 world, and therefore pointing the way for a historical project that explored the various forces that shaped and regulated sexual life” (Weeks Making Sexual History 9). The effects of the taxonomy of sexuality are alive and evident today, even amid immense advances towards acceptance and equality for queer individuals. Influenced by the work of Foucault, Gayle Rubin insists that “families play a crucial role in enforcing sexual conformity. . . . Popular ideology holds that families are not supposed to produce or harbor erotic non-conformity. Many families respond by trying to reform, punish, or exile sexually offending members” (328). In an attempt to conform to social expectations or laws, families and individuals often police themselves by monitoring their behaviours (at least their public behaviours), words, and even their thoughts, in order to appear

“normal.” The fact that countless homosexuals have been closeted, or felt the need to be closeted, points to the social undesirability of sexual non-conformity—even today. Rubin writes that “the interplay of social forces such as ideology, fear, political agitation, legal reform, and medical practice can change the structure of sexual behavior and alter its consequences” (313). When taken together, it is clear that the medicalization of sexuality has led to real and grave consequences to lives of homosexuals.

My exploration of the intersection of medical diagnoses of sexuality and twentieth-century American lesbian-identified literature begins with a survey and analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical theories pertaining to homosexuality. I begin with nineteenth-century European sexological theories, as this marks the beginning of pathological classification of homosexuality, and hence, the origin of research into causation of homosexuality and treatment or “curative” measures for the “illness.” By analyzing and tracing the historical research of the leading influential sexological 9 scientists, medical doctors, and psychologists, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing,

Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Kinsey, one can recreate the social climate for homosexuals in the United States in the twentieth century. The resulting medical taxonomies of variant sexualities are rife with personality and behaviour stereotypes of homosexuals, some of which are still evident today. From initial diagnoses of gender inversion beginning in the late 1800s to the psychoanalytic assertions of homosexual immaturity in the early- to mid-1900s, to Cold War fears of homosexual predators, and the AIDS crisis of the late 1900s, one can discern an evolving understanding and interpretation of homosexuality within the medical and psychological communities that nevertheless still evinced the standard revisiting of the disease model.

By examining the shifting psycho-medico models of sexuality throughout the twentieth century through the lens of historical theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith

Butler, Adrienne Rich, and Gayle Rubin, one can gain a richer understanding of the literature produced in that era. Foucault’s theories on sexuality in light of social and educational means of discipline shed light on the ways in which medical and psychological authority can function as forces of social control over individual behaviour, with the outcome goal of subservience and conformity. Butler adds to Foucault’s argument by suggesting that the act of labeling behaviours creates a binary of socially acceptable and unacceptable categories that promote individual conformity. Rich’s arguments regarding hierarchical social models of gender and sexuality build on

Foucault’s theories and are particularly useful when considered in regard to the ways in which social forces of authority, such as doctors, police, and law makers, can attempt to control free speech in literature through censorship of questionably obscene materials. 10

Finally, Gayle Rubin’s contribution to the literature makes evident the ways in which these publicly accepted bodies of authority function together to reproduce and enforce hierarchical models of ideal social conformity.

Taken as a whole, the historical practice of medicalizing sexuality and the works of key philosophers and theorists that speak to the effects of this medicalization enrich one’s understanding of the art produced in the twentieth century. In my thesis, I focus specifically on the works of three American lesbian-identified novels: Djuna Barnes’s

Nightwood, Vin Packer’s Spring Fire, and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. With reference to these novels, I explore the ways in which the authors incorporate and appropriate medical discourses of the time in order to highlight their inherent flaws. In particular, Barnes exploits modernist and gothic excess to effect a comedic and grotesque overrepresentation that challenges sexological invert theories and early psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality. Packer works within the boundaries of strictly enforced censorship laws on literature in the United States in the 1950s, while also subtly challenging the pathological medical discourse of the time. Unlike the novels before her, rather than appropriate the medical model, Brown effects her message of queer normality, and hence divergence from negative medical labels and stereotypes, through a headstrong and confident protagonist who adopts civil rights arguments and applies them to the oppressed homosexual population. While my analysis could extend farther than Brown’s novel, her work offers a salient endpoint: 1973 marks the psychiatric declassification of homosexuality as a disease, and hence it is a significant year in queer medical history. In addition to literature, I also briefly examine the ways in which other media, in particular film, function within censorship laws and amid pathologizing medical discourse. Film 11 director Alfred Hitchcock produced an unusual number of films in the mid-twentieth century that featured queer protagonists. However, and in contrast to Barnes and Packer,

Hitchcock did not appropriate and subvert medical discourses in order to further queer rights. Instead, his films promote the disease model of homosexuality and exploit the stereotypes of sociopathic, immature, predatory, and dangerous homosexuals. I examine

Hitchcock’s films in depth in this thesis because it makes sense to study a body of work by one director as opposed to multiple pieces by multiple artists. Hitchcock presents himself as an interesting film director to study due to the unusual number of queer protagonists he featured at a time when strict censorship of films with queer content was in place [to avoid the repetition] in accordance with the motion picture censorship law, commonly known as the Hay’s Code. Hitchcock was the only film director of the 1950s for whom it was not uncommon to feature homosexual protagonists, and although most of his homosexual characters are male, his representations of homosexuality support the medical and scientific authoritative discourse of the 1950s that deemed the homosexual both diseased and potentially criminal. Throughout his career, Hitchcock was experimental with his presentation and delivery of story and character while managing to maintain mainstream appeal and to bypass censorship laws by adhering to a stereotypically negative depiction of homosexuals. By studying both American literature and film from the twentieth century, I am able to take a broader view of the scope of authoritarian discipline and control over sexuality in the United States.

CHAPTER ONE

A HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF SEXUALITY

Writing in the mid to late 1900s, Michel Foucault has been a pivotal influence on feminism, discourses on power, and research involving the history of sexuality. Foucault writes that “medicine made a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created an entire organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of ‘incomplete’ sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of related pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of ‘development’ and instinctual ‘disturbances’; and it undertook to manage them” (The History of Sexuality 41). Foucault analyzed the regimes of power that were spearheaded by the medical and psychiatric communities, first in Europe and subsequently in the United States. His argument that “nation-building is firmly yoked to heterosexist relations and discourses” (Desiree Lewis 104) makes sense in light of medical discourses that support heteropatriarchy. We can see that the type of authoritarian control that Foucault discusses begins for young children in the family setting in the home, and from there expands as children grow to include other authoritative sources, such as education, law, religion, and employment settings. One learns from a very young age that in order to be accepted by family or community one must behave in the prescribed and societally accepted manner, and quite often this preferred behaviour is indicative of underlying heterosexual and patriarchal doctrine.

One of the dangers associated with the medicalizing of homosexuality during the late 1800s and early 1900s was that the primary medical approaches to sexuality subscribed to the theory that there was only one normal sexuality (heterosexuality), and 13 that all other sexualities were deviant. As people turned to the medical community as a source of informed knowledge of sexuality, forces of medical and mental authority gained power and sway as the dictators of social and emotional normalcy. American citizens attempted to curb/police individual behaviours and activities that were linked to excesses and self-indulgence because “American physicians drew connections between nervousness and moral corruption that pointed to a number of deleterious modern developments believed to engender homosexuality” (Terry 74). Hence, sexuality became linked to ideas and ideals of morality, maturity, and sickness and subsequently nation- building and medicalized interpretations of individual health. Terry points out that “at stake in theories of causation in the context of the United States were larger moral and, indeed, political concerns over whether homosexuality could be prevented, eliminated, or, at the very least, contained” (73). With medical professionals making claims that homosexuality was a sign or symptom of immaturity or sickness, citizens accordingly sought to root out the disease.

Interestingly, the medical community did not concern itself with studies of sexuality until the nineteenth century. As Jonathan Katz points out,

[t]he treatment of homosexuality by medical practitioners is of relatively

recent origin, and is closely tied to the conceptualization of homosexuality

as a medical-psychological phenomenon, a “mental illness.” This

conceptualization is itself a fairly recent invention: European discussion of

homosexuality as a medical phenomenon dates to the early 1800s. (Gay

American History 130) 14

Since the medical classification of homosexuality originated in Europe, any study of homosexuality must begin with European theories that heavily influenced American medical doctors, psychologists, and sexuality theorists. In 1893, the Viennese sexologist

Richard von Krafft-Ebing published the first substantive book on the study of sexuality:

Psychopathia Sexualis. In their 2002 volume Sexualities in History, Kim Phillips and

Barry Reay describe the work of Krafft-Ebing and his hypotheses regarding sexuality as follows:

[t]he differentiation of pathological and healthy sexuality—reproduction

being the touchstone—was the basic assumption in his taxonomy; at the

same time, the barriers between the normal and abnormal were subverted

in his discussion of the main perversions. Sadism, masochism, and

fetishism were not only disease categories, but also terms that described

extremes on a graded scale of health and illness, and explained aspects of

“normal” sexuality. (277)

As the medicalization of sexuality began from the point of comparison to and differentiation from heterosexuality, heterosexuality was presumed to be the more natural, and hence the normal expression of sexuality, compared to any other sexual orientation or behaviour. In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing labels homosexuality as

“perverse feeling for the same sex” (309), and he tellingly refers to heterosexual sex as

“normal sexual intercourse” (310). Hence, the late 1800s and early 1900s marked a time in history when individual sexuality began to be socially scrutinized and judged—it became the business of medical and mental professionals to understand, diagnose, and control sexuality. 15

Negative classification of homosexuality by physicians is among the reasons why the notion that homosexuals were mentally ill proliferated. In An American Obsession:

Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society, Jennifer Terry claims that

“nineteenth-century American physicians tended to classify many expressions of sexuality that contradicted strict standards of heterosexual monogamous matrimony as diseased. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of published medical cases equated ‘sex perversion’ with lunacy” (77). Medical discourses and diagnoses were not the only manner through which these beliefs disseminated, but they did lend authority to them.

Since medical theories generally “reflected dominant conventions of the time” (78), churches and lawmakers could easily corroborate their viewpoints on the normalcy of heterosexuality and the abnormality of homosexuality. It is clear why homosexual individuals who sought professional medical or psychiatric counselling in the early twentieth century and were informed that their sexuality was problematic or diseased would have internalized this authoritative diagnosis and attempted to hide their sexuality or submit to “cures” that made claims to restore perverted individuals to a normal, healthy sexual life.

The expansive taxonomy created by European sexologists would enable law creation and enforcement, along with subsequent attempts to further document and control the spread of homosexuality. Indeed, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis reads as a scandalous series of accounts of individual sexual expressions labeled as perversions.

These sex perversions were more often than not indicated by medical and psychiatric authorities to be the result of a documented illness and/or dysfunctional family situation such as epilepsy, a temporary break in mental wellbeing, blood relation to lunatics, or a 16 history of childhood sexual abuse. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan argue in Sexology in

Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires that sexology was able to maintain authoritative strength as a scientific explanation for homosexuality in the early twentieth century partly because of its “reservoir of case histories, its strategies of identification and classification noting the habits, behaviors and physical appearance of sexual inverts” (200). In addition,

Bland and Doan point out that due to “its methodical delineation of abnormal behavior, sexological literature could demonstrate, with the ostensible force of scientific objectivity, the imperative for such a law and its implementation” (200). Unfortunately for homosexuals in Europe, and soon thereafter in the United States, it became simple for lawmakers, politicians, and police officers to abuse the sexological data and treat it as empirical proof in order to impose regulatory legislation that demonized, punished, and/or dissuaded same-sex relationships and sexual expression (Bland and Doan 200).

Homosexuals were theorized to be contrary to the natural order and the presumed normal sexuality that followed the expected procreative ideals that dictated that members of

“both” sexes would be naturally, and logically, attracted to members of the “opposite” sex. Those individuals who were attracted to members of the same sex were thought by sexologists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to be gender inverted, and hence display the characteristics, preferences, and behaviours of the opposite sex—in this way, the gender inverts were thought to be readily identifiable based on obvious nonconformity to their gender (Terry 35). In the section of

Psychopathia Sexualis labeled “General Pathology,” Krafft-Ebing states of lesbians that

“where the inversion is fully developed, the woman so acting assumes definitely the masculine role” (418), and states that “[g]ynandry represents the extreme grade of 17 degenerative homosexuality. The woman of this type possesses of the feminine qualities only the genital organs; thought, sentiment, action, even external appearance are those of the man” (Krafft-Ebing 419). This disciplinary language enforces male/female binary roles and demonizes the female identified person who takes on presumed male roles, and vice versa. This type of heterosexist theorizing paved the way for purported curative measures and social ostracization of gender and sexuality non-conformists.

In the late nineteenth century, sexologist Havelock Ellis uniquely undertook to interview homosexuals who were not incarcerated. He acknowledges in his anthology

Studies in the Psychology of Sex “that before [his] first cases were published not a single

British case, unconnected with the asylum or the prison, had ever been recorded” (3).

Ellis considered homosexuality to be a congenital organic variation (Terry 50). As such, homosexuality was not, according to Ellis, the individual’s fault or weakness, and consequently, Ellis concluded, the homosexual should not be punished for his or her biological aberration. Rather than an arguably blamable behaviour such as criminality, he viewed homosexuality as akin to any other emotional or physical disease: “an abnormal manifestation of the sexual instinct” (2). Ellis and Krafft-Ebing promoted the idea that

“the invert lacked the ability to see and feel normal emotional desires toward the opposite sex” (Terry 50-51). While the previous statement could, in some ways, be interpreted as supportive of homosexuality, in that it may imply that sexual orientation is not something that can be cured, it also denotes a problem. When any human attribute is categorized as normal, there is an implicit hierarchical structure that places that attribute as the preferred and that privileges it above all others. It implies that anything that deviates from the purported normal is abnormal and hence, undesirable. 18

Judith Butler complicates and questions the validity of the notion of labelling gender and sexuality at all. She maintains that one of the problems with identity categories is that they “tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression” (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” 308). If we strip away identity categories, and the need to fit into one binary or another, gender and sexuality nonconformity become a nonissue. However, this poses major barriers in North

American society, which is largely divided according to binary categories such as homosexual/heterosexual, male/female, and black/white, rather than something wholly unpresumptuous such as person. These categories have become so internalized and familiar to most people that it can be difficult to simply try to conceptualize any individual without taking into account their sexuality, gender, and race. When one discerns binaries relating to sexuality, gender, and race as linked to the authoritarian disciplines of medicine, psychiatry, education, and law, one can sift the significance and correlation between social binaries and hetero-patriarchal ideals and notions of nation- building.

Among the problems stemming from Ellis’s theory is the obvious allegation that homosexuality was an illness or disease, and all of the implications associated with this classification of sickness and abnormality. Viewed in this light, homosexuality was something that people wanted to avoid, prevent and condemn, and this implied that the individuals afflicted with the disease of homosexuality were to be pitied. Ellis did, however, dispel 19

many of the negative stereotypes surrounding male homosexuality, such as

the notions that homosexual men were innately promiscuous, misogynist,

and effeminate. Ellis did not extend the same charitable understanding to

lesbians. To the contrary, he emphasized their mannishness and their

tendencies toward predation, while criticizing their feminist beliefs as

pathological. (Terry 51)

Arising from the premise that homosexuality was a congenital disease, appeared eugenic ideals, scientific studies, and experimentations with the goal of sanitizing the population and controlling and preventing the perpetuation of this frightening sexual illness—after all, if it was an physical or mental illness, there must be a potential cure or treatment, and prevention measures. Ultimately, “even though he claimed to do otherwise, many of

Ellis’s ideas defaulted to prevailing assumptions that linked homosexuality with pathology” (Terry 51). Subsequently, medical and psychological professionals studied the differences between sexualities. Their focus on difference as anomaly rather than as variances of normalcy supported theories that homosexuality was an illness or was abnormal compared to socially accepted procreative heterosexuality.

It followed that when sexuality became acknowledged as having potentially pathological variations, physicians endeavoured to study differences in the expression of sexuality, and the causes for these. Terry explains that since it is essentially a physician’s job to classify and document disease, “doctors’ expertise concerning the body gave them authority to comment on causality, prevalence, and treatment of any socially deviant behavior that they could plausibly link to heredity or to bodily processes” (40). One can almost trace the thought process that would lead a scientist to conclude that there was a 20 normal sexuality, and hence all other representations of sexuality must be abnormal.

Considering that homosexuality was classified as abnormal or diseased in the early twentieth century, the possibility of visually identifying the sick individuals became of interest to medical professionals. Terry maintains that “the most pronounced scientific legacy from the initial medical writings was the idea that the homosexual was an inherently distinct type of person” (68). This type of sexuality classification based on appearance or traits is still prevalent, though less so, today. We continue to see characters in film and literature whose lesbianism, gayness, or queerness is depicted by their exterior masculine/tomboyish, or effeminate appearance. In other words, the homosexual character often does not fit societal gender binary expectations. One need only watch a television episode of Glee to see that these cookie-cutter representations of homosexuality are still prevalent. Through American and British television shows such as

The L Word, Queer as Folk, and Lip Service, however, fictional representation of homosexuals in the early twenty-first century are evolving to include a gamut of possibilities. While these programs do still feature stereotypical portrayals of masculine lesbians and feminine gay men, the range and variety of personality attributes and appearance they also depict is somewhat refreshing to the narrow view that was previously almost exclusively circulated.

Due to published accounts linking homosexuality with pathology and criminology, the general population began to worry over the consequences of homosexuals at large in their communities. Widespread fears of the dangers posed by homosexuals in America in 1937 led New York City’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to appoint 21

a Committee for the Study of Sex Crimes, consisting of psychiatrists,

lawyers, and criminologists. The committee recommended that sex

offenders be subject to psychiatric observation and given indeterminate

sentences, preferably to be served in secure medical facilities, where they

would be examined and treated by psychiatrists until they were deemed

rehabilitated. (Terry 276)

The power and reach of this committee that was steeped in heterosexist notions of nation- building further complicated any ability for American homosexuals to be free of unwarranted persecution. Horrifyingly, as Terry affirms, “the perception among many psychiatrists that homosexuality was fundamentally psychopathic made those arrested for homosexual offenses a readily available population upon which to try out various kinds of psychiatric intervention” (277). Faced with this knowledge, it becomes exceedingly clear why accounts of healthy homosexuals in the early twentieth century are nearly impossible to find—after all, if confessing one’s sexual desires could lead to unwanted medical intervention, treatment, and imprisonment, one could argue that the primary cases of known homosexuals were those who suffered from mental or physical complications that may not have been related to their sexual behaviours or desires.

Arguably, if all homosexuals from the early twentieth century had been medically examined (as opposed to the homosexuals who happened to be incarcerated or have possible psychiatric illnesses), and if homosexuality had been accepted as a “normal” branch of sexuality rather than a demonized and purportedly abnormal sexuality, homosexuals would not have been stigmatized as diseased and depraved, since taken as a group, these individuals likely would have tested much the same as the heterosexual 22 population would have. This theory does not, however, take into account that any medicalization of sexuality naturally implies an authoritarian discourse and a regime of surveillance through rigid taxonomy. Hence, if homosexuality was not the stigmatized expression of sexuality, another form of sexuality would have taken its place as the oppressed abnormal variant of sexuality, since it is through the medical classification itself that the moral judgement of right versus wrong or normal versus abnormal is born and regulated.

As outrageous as it can be in the twenty-first century to consider that any consensual sexual act between adults was considered criminal and punishable in the

United States, this was the reality for homosexuals less than one hundred years ago.

Homosexuality was largely viewed as problematic and was labeled as abnormal based on participation, or the desire to participate in, non-procreative sexual acts. Medical diagnosis served as an effective tool to control sexuality. William Greenslade affirms that

“there is evidence to show that the category of homosexuality became effective as a boundary at the end of the [nineteenth] century. Medical investigation detailed certain sexual practices as deviations from a prescribed model of normal behaviour” (23). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Dr. Frank Lydston, a urologist from Chicago, “believed that the extirpation of the ovaries and clitoridectomy would solve the problem of lesbianism”

(Terry 80). Such proposed cures supported hetero-patriarchal gender and sexuality roles even through the fear of their horrendous possibility, should an individual be identified as queer. Alongside nation-building ideals and eugenics movements, homosexuals and heterosexuals were classified according to stereotyped desirable in contrast to undesirable traits. Terry states that “the homosexual was viewed as having many of the same 23 characteristics that distinguished ‘primitive’ races from their ‘advanced’ European heterosexual counterparts, namely degeneracy, atavism, regression, and hypersexuality”

(36). When faced with such negative connotations, one would most likely strive to distance oneself from association with the deviant population. To make matters worse,

since all homosexual acts were against the law and most were classified as

“sex offenses,” homosexual men were lumped together in the public

imagination with violent offenders, rapists, and child molesters.

Homosexuals became easy scapegoats in the context of public hysteria

over sex crimes against children that were fueled by the popular press.

(Terry 273)

Medical and psychiatric professionals who labeled homosexuality as a perversion and disease supported the horrible ties that were drawn between crime and sexuality. Surely the notion of being linked to violent sex offenders and child molesters was enough to cause many homosexuals to actively guard their sexual identity.

Social purity campaigns in the United States sought and promoted monogamous heterosexual matrimonial coupling, and attempted to eliminate all other expressions of sexuality. Terry states that “beginning around 1870, social purity campaigns emerged with the goal of ridding society of a host of evil forces seen to be fostered by modern city life. The movement reflected the notions from evangelical Christianity that God punishes sinners, that sin is contagious, and that innocents should be protected” (89). What was thought to be inherited was a predisposition to negative, immoral, and criminal traits, so sterilization was recommended for homosexuals in order to prevent the proliferation of this disease and its associated negative effects on the theoretically normal heterosexual 24 people in society. Many American doctors subscribed to a degenerationist framework model, so they looked to eugenics to heal the perpetuation of homosexuality (93). Terry states that

American physicians’ ideas about sexual perversion and city life were

shaped by and contributed to conservative sentiments about maintaining

order in the face of profoundly changing, diverse, and often antagonistic

urban populations. Many of their ideas resonated with reactionary “social

purity” campaigns that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth

century. (88)

Proponents of social purity distributed pamphlets and other advertising material that condemned homosexuality, and made exaggerated and ludicrous predictions that homosexuality was to overrun and destroy the moral stature of American people if unchecked. Many of the claims by social purity advocates strongly echo current

Salvationist doctrine that “calls for chastity outside of heterosexual marriage and faithfulness within it,” and that supports beliefs that “marriage is the covenanting together of one man and one woman for life in a union to the exclusion of all others,” and that “the family is ideally rooted in the biblical concept of a marriage covenant of one man and one woman” (salvationarmy.ca). The ideals promoted by the Salvation Army are not only rooted in heterosexist nation-building ideals, but they endorse the dated idea that heterosexuality is the right and medically normal sexuality. These beliefs hearken back to the social purity campaigns with the noticeable exception that the Salvation Army attempts to cover its bigoted and binary views on sexuality beneath the guise of charitable work. This example of the current teachings of an active evangelical organization exhibits 25 strikingly similar moral values to those upheld by late nineteenth-century conservative

Americans. Clearly, with some evangelical religious factions still thriving in Canada and the United States that endorse a binary and hierarchical view of sexuality, one cannot claim that the damaging vestiges of the disease model as applied to sexuality have been erased.

When sexuality is examined in light of historical medical doctrine, and the supposed deviant variations of sexuality are viewed according to a disease model, potential treatment solutions for the deviant expressions of sexuality are a dire consequence. Leonore Tiefer draws attention to the notion that medicine and its associated diagnoses can be a

deeply moral exercise, a factor which is especially important in politically

contested zones such as sexual behavior. From the perspective of medical

sociology and cultural studies, medicalization is one of the primary

ideologies of social regulation, and thus the assumptions and practices of

sexology not only guide professional work but have broad social

consequences. (265)

Throughout the twentieth century, many confessed or accused homosexuals have been the victims of unwanted, and sometimes dangerous, medical and psychological interventions with the intent of curing them of their sexuality problems that theoretically stemmed from social nonconformity to the dominant model of heterosexuality.

Dangerous experiments in surgical treatments for homosexuality are a prime example of the power and far-reaching consequences attributable to an authoritative medical regime over human sexuality. Katz explicates that 26

among the treatments are surgical measures: castration, hysterectomy, and

vasectomy. . . . Lobotomy was performed as late as 1951. A variety of

drug therapies have been employed, including the administration of

hormones, LSD, sexual stimulants, and sexual depressants. . . . Other

documented “cures” are shock treatment, both electric and chemical;

aversion therapy, employing nausea-inducing drugs, electric shock, and/or

negative verbal suggestion; and a type of behavior therapy called

“sensitization,” intended to increase heterosexual arousal, making

ingenious use of pornographic photos. (Gay American History 129)

These treatments could often be viewed as akin to torture since they at times involved the use of physically and mentally harmful substances, exposures, and experimental surgeries. Tiefer notes that “the central moral component in the biomedical model is the health norm, the demarcation between good and bad in the world of medicine.

Diagnostics searches for abnormalities; assessment technology calibrates deflections from standard values; benign variation from a health norm is a contradiction in terms”

(265-266). Therefore, while the study in general of sexuality by the medical community may not in itself be harmful, the labeling of normal and subsequent variant sexualities provides an inherent moral judgement along with an opinion of the right manner of expressing one’s sexuality that feeds into American nation-building ideals. Any binary of this sort in which there is a normal, and hence abnormal, category problematizes what could otherwise be a benign signifier of identity by drawing comparisons with the usual, expected, normative, or ideal way to be. 27

The binary view of sexuality as either right or wrong initiated by the medical and psychiatric disease model created a paradigm whereby attributes were correlated with homosexuality and heterosexuality in such a way that a dominant sexuality

(heterosexuality) was viewed as the ideal and preferred sexuality. It is obvious why this dominantly accepted sexuality would be interpreted by the average citizen as the desired way to express one’s sexuality when not conforming to this norm could result in multiple forms of social ostracization including job loss, loss of family and friends, and the subjection to questionable medical treatments and attempts to cure. Mary Louise Adams points out that matters were made worse:

the increasing influence of psychoanalytic theories in the postwar period

also meant that heterosexuality was not simply a means of organizing

relationships between women and men; rather it came to be seen as

essential to the expression of “maturity,” and it determined one’s ability to

make claims on normality, that most important of postwar social

classifications. (9-10)

So homosexuals were not only judged as potentially perverted, criminal, and/or insane, but also as immature. Terry explains that Sigmund Freud “maintained that homosexuality only became a neurotic personality disturbance in the event that the adult individual could not adequately (i.e., without neuroses) mature to the cultural demands of sexual repression and heterosexual reproduction” (60). So ideals of nation-building were linked to reproduction and Americans were expected to conform to this standard at the very least by suppressing all non-heterosexual desires. The mark of immaturity attributed by psychoanalysts further added fuel to public fears that homosexuals were child molesters 28 on the basis of unfounded circular reasoning that an individual who had not properly matured into adulthood may not be attracted to adults. Prominent psychoanalysts added to this deviant interpretation of homosexuality and the subsequent alienation of a large number of the American population by studying sexualities in terms of differentiation from the prescribed and assumed normal sexuality. It was not until Alfred Kinsey’s studies of sexuality in the 1960s that the possibility of homosexuality as a form of medically deemed normal sexuality was entertained scientifically in the United States.

The consequence to Kinsey’s published research, however, was that some homophobic people used his research statement “that most individuals were not exclusively heterosexual or homosexual but somewhere in between, to create a moral panic. They argued that the homosexual, like the Communist, posed a direct threat to both national and personal security. Foes of the ‘homosexual menace’ tried to portray themselves as good heterosexual Americans” (Mackenzie 606). This meant that, while homosexuals were legitimized as not afflicted by a medical disease by Kinsey’s report, his findings were also skewed to promote a negative heteropatriarchal agenda to incite fear in common citizens that dangerous homosexuals could be lurking anywhere.

Medical treatments and law enforcement against homosexual acts in the United

States were particularly tough, even when other countries began to adopt a more tolerant view of homosexuality. In 1909, in an concentrated effort to rid America of homosexuality, “the National Committee for Mental Hygiene formed in New York City with the aims of preventing psychological problems and of improving the care and treatment of those suffering from mental diseases” (Terry 106). Chief among the psychological problems that the National Committee for Mental Hygiene sought to 29 eliminate or cure was homosexuality: “the mental hygienic view was basically that homosexuality should be overcome; and the virtue of adjustment therapy, as it was conceived by Meyer, was that it furthered the goal of ensuring mental health through social conformity” (Terry 110). The suggestion of “mental health through social conformity” calls to mind Foucault’s theory of a social policing based on Jeremy

Bentham’s model of the panopticon—after all, if individuals believe that mental health, as outlined by psychological and medical professionals, is necessary for a successful life, and that mental health can be achieved through conformity to moral and sexual social standards, it is likely that most individuals will strive for at least the external appearance of this form of conformity to the ideals of an authoritative regime.

Social acceptability is a simple and effective method to quickly manage human behaviours through fear. The problem with this type of instruction intended to control is that it can backfire with the subject eventually rebelling against the presumed authority.

Revolt against fear-based (negative punishment) training rather than incentive-based

(positive reinforcement) is observed regularly in dogs as well as humans, and it can be dangerous. Dog trainer Emma Parsons reports that negative punishment training with her aggressive dog drastically worsened the dog’s behaviour: “he lunged, bared his teeth, and screamed, as globs and globs of saliva started dripping from both sides of his mouth . . . .

The side effects from Ben's punishment were much more traumatic than the original behavior we started with” (Parsons). When compared to the example of the dog whose behaviour the trainer attempted to control through fear and punishment, we can see similarities to the treatment by governing authorities and their attempt to control homosexual subjects through fear and intimidation. Active rebellion against fear-based 30 governing, laws, and social intimidation intended to curb or eliminate homosexuality has been witnessed in the United States, notably with the 1969 Stonewall riots. As homosexuals began to realize that they were not alone in their sexuality—through literature, art, social history, and the formation of community groups such as ACT UP,

Queer Nation, the Mattachine Society, Daughters of Bilitis, and numerous chapters of

Homophile Organizations that contributed to the beginnings of legal, social, and community resources for queer individuals—homosexual activism became progressively more prevalent. In the United States, increasingly more communities have gradually begun to host annual Pride parades and related events in order to celebrate the diversity of sexual expression and voice current social inequalities. As such, Pride events have become a symbol of hope for oppressed members of society to celebrate difference and acceptance, as well as a platform to fight for civil liberties.

The belief that there was a need for any form of control strategies relating to human sexual expression was the result of labeling homosexuality as abnormal.

Following the stigmatization of homosexuality according to a pathology model, most

American physicians “believed that incarcerating [homosexuals] in asylums and subjecting them to experimental surgeries were effective control strategies. In this respect, homosexual asylum patients were treated very much like others who were diagnosed as insane or feebleminded” (Terry 81). Terry further informs that among the treatments employed to cure homosexuals of their unnatural drives, and “consonant with the increasing popularity of the eugenics movement in the United States, castration and sterilization procedures were used not only as experimental techniques to stem homosexual sex drive but to prevent the birth of defective offspring” (82). The fear of 31 contagion and contamination by homosexuals to the healthy population broadened as developing scientific explanations for variations of sexuality continued. Greenslade evinces that by the beginning of the twentieth century

the threat posed by the condition of mental instability, and by the growing

numbers of mental defectives, was dealt with by turning away from mid-

century practices of “moral management” to a deterministic model of

insanity—deployed by the medical profession in the expanding County

Asylums (the numbers in 1900 were thirteen times those at their

mandatory establishment in 1845). (24)

This biological deterministic theory of sexuality promoted heterosexism by hypothesizing that homosexuality was a genetic disease and akin to disorders such as epilepsy or schizophrenia, in that there was nothing patients could actively do to rid themselves of the disease, and instead they were simply congenitally mentally ill. One of the consequences of this, as Greenslade points out, was an enormous number of homosexual individuals who were incarcerated in asylums exclusively because of their purported incurable sexual disease.

The legalization of medical sterilization procedures on homosexual patients is documented throughout the United States as a startlingly common treatment or eugenic strategy. Terry reports that

starting in 1907, several states began to pass statutes legalizing eugenic

sterilization procedures, with Indiana being the first. By 1917, fifteen other

states had such laws, and by 1931 the total came to thirty. All the laws

passed by 1921 and many that were passed later were applied to “sexual 32

perverts,” and some states listed “moral degenerates” as appropriate

candidates for sterilization. This latter group included homosexuals,

prostitutes, drug addicts, and syphilitics. According to conservative

estimates, by 1931 just over 12,000 operations had been performed in the

United States. (82)

These types of eugenic ideals of sexual purity were taken to such an extent that, in the name of scientific inquiry, Krafft-Ebing undertook a project in which measurements were taken of the genitals of lesbians to determine whether it was possible to tell through physical examination whether a woman was a lesbian or a “normal” heterosexual woman.

In fact, in the United States, as Terry points out, “many of the cases of female inversion and sex perversion included comments on the physical features of patients. In particular, the genitals of lesbians were often examined by psychiatrists with the help of gynecologists who applied their skills and knowledge of female anatomy to discern any characteristics that might indicate homosexuality” (86). This type of testing was possible and accepted by the public because it was believed that homosexuals posed a threat to society, and that anyone engaging in sex other than heterosexual sex could be criminal, insane, or immature, and hence a danger to others and a danger to the nation.

Ultimately, the surest way to maintain a functioning patriarchal society is to enforce heterosexist doctrine that ensures female subservience and obedience to male rule. During pivotal times in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history when women attempted to step away from a complacent or powerless stature, there were marked societal attempts to halt female social progress and maintain the status quo. Writing with reference to the early nineteenth-century lesbianism, Terry indicates that 33

medical writings from this period of transition indicate a growing

preoccupation with the consequences of women’s greater presence in the

public sphere. Indeed, in this context, physicians found female

homosexuality in particular a puzzling problem requiring modified

etiological theories that increasingly revealed an uneasiness about

women’s independence from men. (62)

So same-sex female sexuality was conceptualized as potentially threatening to male power and dominance over women since a successful lesbian partnership could demonstrate independence from male power. Denouncing this conception of lesbianism as a threat to the idealized nation, Adrienne Rich declares that the lie of compulsory heterosexuality

asserts that primary love between the sexes is “normal,” that women need

men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for

psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the

basic social unity; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to

men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating

outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. (657)

An important step to break down the type of subservient and second-class citizen stature that is attributed to women and homosexuals with this brand of patriarchal thinking is to acknowledge that sexuality itself is normal in humans, and hence to eliminate medical stigma and declassify homosexuality as deviant by removing the authoritative power of the word “normal” when used as medical discourse by attributing normality to all sexuality. If we allow that homosexuality is not a deviant form of sexuality, we 34 intrinsically acknowledge that women do not need men in order to thrive and contribute productively in society. This is an essential step toward an acceptance of all individuals regardless of falsely constructed gender and sexuality binaries.

As sexuality continued to be treated scientifically in America, and as a search for causality in order to determine methods of cure of pathological sexual expression persisted, public discussion and the voicing of opinion on matters of sexuality grew more common. The increasing openness to discuss topics of sexuality, however, did not make it more acceptable either to identify as homosexual or admit that one had partaken in any behaviour classified as such. Phillips and Reay affirm that “throughout the 1920s and

1930s, traditional sexual morality was increasingly at variance with people’s actual behavior” (327) in the United States. The discussion that took place among friends or in the family would have been influenced by medical and psychological theories of the time, as well as church doctrine that overwhelmingly promoted a monogamous heterosexual family structure as the only route to healthy adulthood. Even when some theorists and medical authorities began to voice claims to the naturalness of homosexuality, its deterrents tended to be louder. Foucault states that “since sexuality was a medical and medicalizable object, one had to try and detect it—as a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptom—in the depths of the organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of behavior” (The History of Sexuality 44), and consequently, “an entire medico- sexual regime took hold of the family milieu” (42). Foucault posited that rather than being enlightened or novel views of human sexuality, the new medical influences on theories of causality and sexual expression were new methods by which individuals in positions of authority could manage and discipline societally desirable expressions of 35 sexuality. In this way, the new medical experts supported bigoted church doctrine and outdated anti-homosexual laws.

Interestingly, even as European doctors began to move towards notions of decriminalization in regard to homosexual acts, North American doctors took much longer to reach this consensus. Terry explains that the

dominant ethos of American individualism, with its privileging of will-

power and self-improvement, helps to account for American physicians’

initial intolerance toward homosexuality. Nineteenth-century American

doctors tended to embrace American hegemonic ideals of upward mobility

and social adjustment, which they believed would be best achieved

through the individual’s moral tenacity and dedication to hard work. (79)

This protracted delay by American physicians to normalize homosexuality continued. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases (DSM). Terry claims that the campaign for the removal of this disease classification

highlighted psychiatrists’ inhumane use of psychopharmaceuticals,

lobotomy, psychoanalysis, and aversion therapy to eliminate homosexual

desires in patients who, if freed from homophobic contempt, might be

happy and valuable citizens. During this same time, activists broadened

their strategies considerably by passing anti-discriminatory legislation and

filing lawsuits against those violating the civil rights of individuals on the

basis of sexual orientation. (367-368) 36

The step to remove homosexuality from the DSM was imperative in the movement toward acceptance by the medical community of multiple expressions of sexuality as normative, and hence to accept queer individuals as equal and productive members of society. It is important to recognize how recently the removal of the negative medical classification of homosexuality occurred, and also to acknowledge that this removal— hence acceptance—has not yet been fully extended toward individuals who identify as transgendered or transsexual.

Sexuality may not have become an issue in relation to nation-building, eugenics, or social purity campaigns had medical experts not intervened in the personal sexual life of individuals. If sexuality had been viewed as normative regardless of its form of expression, there may not have been the subsequent criminalization and ostracization of homosexuality—without labels whose function it is to delineate normality or abnormality, one could theoretically be free of the associated negatives associated with and attributed to nonconformity. Phillips and Reay interpret Foucault’s thoughts on sexuality as such:

Foucault argues that the modern idea of sexuality was historically

constituted by medical science, which delimited deviance. Before medical

theories emerged that lumped together behavior, physical characteristics,

and the emotional makeup of individuals, there was no entity that could be

delineated as sexuality. Thus, by differentiating between the normal and

the abnormal, and by stigmatizing sexual variance as sickly deviation,

physicians, as exponents of an anonymous “biopower,” were controlling

free and easy pleasures of the body. (272) 37

When examined through this lens of power and control as suggested by Foucault, one must question whether any categories of sexuality are at all valid or useful to individuals, and if people could be better served without the labeling, gendering, and implicit division posited by medical classifications.

Through her theoretical writings, Adrienne Rich posits that homosexuality has been marked as unnatural and sick because it would otherwise threaten the patriarchal system that America has upheld for centuries, and because its normalization could also bring about movement toward equality between genders. Analyzing the socio-cultural effects of past medical categorizations of homosexuality, and on women in particular,

Adrienne Rich asserts that

[h]istorians need to ask at every point how heterosexuality as institution

has been organized and maintained through the female wage scale, the

enforcement of middle-class women’s “leisure,” the glamorization of so-

called sexual liberation, the withholding of education from women, the

imagery of “high art” and popular culture, the mystification of the

“personal” sphere, and much else. We need an economics which

comprehends the institution of heterosexuality, with its doubled workload

for women and its sexual divisions of labor, as the most idealized of

economic relations. (659)

Rich implores the scholar to search for categorical evidence pertaining to why heterosexuality has been normalized in the first place. Butler echoes Rich in her estimation of the function heterosexuality achieves by maintaining its illusory naturalness by pointing to the often presumed theoretical link between gender, sex, and sexuality. 38

Butler adds that “one of the ways that genders get naturalized is through being constructed as an inner psychic or physical necessity. And yet, it is always a surface sign, a signification on and with the public body that produces this illusion of an inner depth, necessity, or essence that is somehow magically, casually expressed” (“Imitation and

Gender Insubordination” 317). When we understand why and how genders and sexualities become naturalized and function to maintain the institution and regime of heterosexual social order, the purported link between gender and sexuality becomes clear.

Additionally, the study of the ways in which women have been subjugated due to compulsory heterosexuality extends to an understanding as to why homosexuals, and lesbians in particular, have also historically been subjected to lesser status than heterosexuals.

The pejorative labeling of homosexuals as physically sick, mentally ill, and morally weak has had devastating effects on the lives of individuals throughout twentieth-century America, but also still visibly affects people today. In fact, at a considerably recent point in history when there appeared to be a potential lessening of punitive and legal action against homosexuals in the United States, the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) crisis brought with it further judgment from the medical community and a consequent re-invigoration of purported claims to heterosexual superiority. Gayle Rubin asserts that

just when homosexuals have had some success in throwing off the taint of

mental disease, gay people find themselves metaphorically welded to an

image of lethal physical deterioration. The syndrome, its peculiar qualities, 39

and its transmissibility are being used to reinforce old fears that sexual

activity, homosexuality, and promiscuity lead to disease and death. (333)

There was unambiguous moral judgment affirmed by the medical community upon the initial labeling and classification of AIDS as GRID (gay related immune deficiency). This publicly asserted bias that a newfound devastating disease was attributed to the homosexual community before certain scientific data was available to determine the actual cause or method of transmission of the disease was an additionally devastating blow and step backwards for the worldwide queer community, and whose repercussions gay and lesbian individuals still experience today as in the case of blood donation bans against gay males.

CHAPTER TWO

LESBIAN-IDENTIFIED LITERATURE

Negative links from the medical community between homosexuality and insanity, criminality, and arrested mental development have greatly impacted the depiction of lesbianism in American literature and film. American novels such as Djuna Barnes’s

Nightwood, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, and Vin Packer’s Spring Fire depict some of the suffering that homosexuals have endured due to prominent medical and psychological theories that tended to seek solutions to the believed problem of homosexuality. In my study of these novels, I will examine the traits, actions, and stereotypes of lesbian identified characters in light of medical and psychological theories regarding homosexuality at the time of their publication. I will discuss whether the characters act as self-fulfilling prophecies according to social stereotypes and medical classifications. To conduct this analysis, I will explore the ways in which medical theories, which have informed social regulation and beliefs surrounding homosexuality and queer individuals, undergo transformation in the three novels. With reference to

Nightwood, I will explore early twentieth-century sexology theories of the invert to study the vastly different personalities of Robin, Nora, and Jenny. In the case of Spring Fire, I will focus on the influences of psychoanalytic theory on the characterization of Mitch and

Leda, and analyze these characters using Foucault’s panopticon and consequent theories of social and self-policing for the sake of fitting in with other so-called healthy individuals in society. In considering Rubyfruit Jungle, I will concentrate on the protagonist, Molly, to explore shifting, and sometimes competing, psychological and 41 medical theories and the effects of changing classifications of homosexuality within the

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I will demonstrate that Brown,

Barnes and Packer endeavor in unique ways to utilize works of fiction to demonstrate the possibility of breaking free of the rigid classifications of sexuality and gender that tended mainly to constrain individuals and work against the emotional well-being of homosexuals.

Throughout the twentieth century, numerous censorship laws were passed in the

United States that ruled that homosexual expression was perverse, and hence, obscene. It is valuable to consider Foucault’s theories on power regimes and nation-building here since many censorship laws supported outdated beliefs, such as the fear of homosexual contagion, under the guise of science in order to uphold heterosexist moral ideals.

Widespread homosexual panic caused fears to circulate regarding gay- and lesbian- identified books such as Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. Jonathan

Dollimore states that “despite ‘enlightened’ testimony to the contrary, those against the novel feared it would encourage or legitimate lesbianism” (99). This type of unfounded fear is alive today in notions that playing violent video games can lead the gamer to enact violent crimes, that watching films with sexual content could lead to some form of moral corruption, and that violent films could normalize aggression. In fact, a large number of public schools in North America today do not offer sexual education other than heterosexual education (Horn et al. 72-73).

Invert theories of the late 1800s and early 1900s were based on what could be interpreted as a precursor to some theories of transgenderism, rather than homosexuality, that arguably innately support the concept of a gender binary by subscribing to the idea 42 that the transgendered individual has been “born in the wrong body,” since invert theories focused on the idea that the afflicted individuals were born the incorrect gender. For example, in The Well of Loneliness the protagonist Stephen Gordon claims: “I must be a boy, ‘cause I feel exactly like one” (Hall 14). Stephen assumes that her gender identity and sexuality issues (i.e., not conforming to heterosexuality) are due to her being born gender inverted—that she should have been born a boy. The theory of gender inversion is key to the way Stephen defines herself, and Hall makes it clear to the reader that this is the case by having Stephen find a book in her father’s study that is alluded to be Krafft-

Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, in which Krafft-Ebing posits his initial theories about the sexual invert. Stephen argues throughout the novel, as Krafft-Ebing does, that sexual inversion is something with which, like a congenital disease, the individual is born. Hall writes that “the intuition of those who stand mid-way between the sexes, is so ruthless, so poignant, so accurate, so deadly, as to be in the nature of an added scourge” (88). So, in the case of the invert, the “disease” of homosexuality is further complicated by the individual’s inability to fit in with the alleged normal society—since it was commonly believed that there were only two genders. Homosexuals who displayed gender characteristics that did not correspond with the accepted social norms associated with one’s biological sex at birth were considered to be, in essence, stuck between the two recognized genders. In lesbian sexual relationships, the feminine (or gender conforming) female was thought to not be genuinely gender inverted or homosexual, but rather the victim of a predatory masculine identifying lesbian invert. This division of gender is reinforced in both Krafft-Ebing’s research and Hall’s novel, and both promote the concept of a gender binary, along with the medical normality associated with the ability 43 to identify strongly with the gender that corresponds to one’s sex at birth. Stephen struggles with her gender identity throughout The Well of Loneliness and often views her female body as a type of punishment. When Angela leaves her, Stephen laments her mannish, yet female, body: “she hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. . . . She longed to main it, for it made her feel cruel” (Hall 210). Heather Love writes that Hall’s novel demonstrates the

“painful negotiation of the coming of modern homosexuality. . . . an account of the corporeal and psychic costs of homophobia” (Feeling Backward 4), and that “The Well offers a meticulous account of the many outrages, failures, and disappointments that attend gender and sexual nonconformity in a homophobic world” (Feeling Backward

107). Despite depicting the emotional horrors of living as an invert in the early 1900s,

Hall does, however, use Stephen’s voice throughout the novel to plead for social tolerance of gender inverted individuals.

In Stephen, Hall presents a functional, productive citizen who does not display the stereotypical predatory qualities that many theorists at the time of the novel’s publication attributed to homosexuals. Susan Watkins argues that Hall “deliberately echoes contemporary sexological interpretations of inversion and makes a plea for compassionate treatment of other ‘sufferers’” (149). In her presentation of Stephen, Hall argues for better treatment and acceptance—at least tolerance—of homosexuals, and she depicts lesbian love as having the potential of normality, as defined by scientific discourse of the time that delineated normal sexuality as a sign of productive and effective citizenship. Lillian Faderman posits that “Hall believed that her novel would 44 provide lesbians with a moral and medical defense against a society which viewed same- sex love as immoral or curable” (Surpassing 317-318). This form of logic follows other biological arguments for sexuality that aimed to make a case for tolerance of homosexuals, since it was viewed as an innate condition that was out of the individual’s control, and hence ought not to be punishable. However, despite Hall’s attempts to normalize homosexuality by creating in Stephen a productive, affluent, and likeable lesbian, the predominant views of homosexuality at the time of publication are also voiced in The Well of Loneliness. One example in which characters harbor strongly negative views of homosexuality is evident when Angela, who at one point in the novel is

Stephen’s lover, pleads with her husband and insists that he understand that she’s “not a pervert” or some “sort of moral degenerate creature” (Hall 223). Angela is less concerned with her husband challenging her on her infidelity than she is with him believing she may be a lesbian. The implication here is that homosexuals are sick, criminal, and animal— they are not ordinary people, but rather “moral degenerate creatures.” Like Krafft-Ebing,

Ellis “believed that homosexuals had aberrantly strong sexual drives, again, emanating from defects of will. In his view, many tended to have irritable ‘sexual centers’ which disturbed the interlocking system of the brain, nerves, reproductive organs, and genitals”

(Terry 52). Claims like these, put forth by published people of medical science, would have inevitably affected the daily lives of homosexuals in Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century. Among other concerns, the type of medical doctrine put forth by sexologists would have made it extremely difficult, if not dangerous, for homosexuals to be open about their sexuality, to obtain equal civil rights to heterosexual individuals, and to maintain employment. 45

A) 1930s / DJUNA BARNES NIGHTWOOD

In light of legal and political platforms over the last decade to decriminalize consensual same-sex acts and moves toward legal civil rights associated with same-sex marriage in the United States, one would expect that circumstances for homosexuals would have steadily improved over time during the twentieth century. Instead, in

America during the1930s, rather than improving, the social situation for gay Americans actually worsened. Jennifer Terry confirms that

the decade was marked by a public backlash against homosexuals of

significant proportions. Lesbians and homosexual men were subjected to

aggressive police raids on gay establishments, to increased arrests for

“homosexual offenses,” and to elaborate extortion schemes. Subjects of

the Sex Variant study [led by American psychiatrist George Henry]

reported being expelled from jobs, evicted from their homes, and

threatened by violence. (268)

Amid changing and sometimes contrasting medical and psychological theoretical bases for the origination and/or causes of homosexuality, and the level of risk or danger presented by individuals who were labeled homosexual, there was a general understanding in the United States that homosexuality was not benign, and that it was a negative and harmful affliction. Terry states that

[i]n the second half of the 1930s, theories about the cause of

homosexuality ranged from hereditary and constitutional explanations to

those emphasizing social conditioning and psychosexual development. But

the general scientific and medical consensus was that homosexuality, 46

when expressed publicly or “overtly,” was not only socially undesirable

but psychopathic. (288)

Hence, the homosexual was viewed as a dangerous criminal and covert threat to a productive nation by most medical and scientific authorities. If, however, the supposed homosexual disease was managed (i.e. not acted upon), and the individual was willing to engage in upheld socially appropriate gendered behaviours and roles such as heterosexual sexual relations, procreation, and marriage, the individual had the theoretical potential to live a normal life.

Throughout the 1930s, the United States grew to become a rather antagonistic social environment for homosexuals, largely due to the American belief in independence and self- improvement. When viewed along the lines of a psychiatric disorder, homosexuality was often perceived by Americans as a personal weakness or failing. In this way, the nation-building discourse that Foucault posits is evident in American psychiatrists’ emphasis that a successful individual is a heterosexual individual. Terry confirms that in the 1930s and 1940s, “some American psychoanalysts grew more hostile toward homosexuals and tended to blame them, rather than society, for their neuroses”

(290-291). By placing the blame for the sexual disease on the weakness of constitution of the homosexual, this American psychoanalytical discourse invoked social policing—with vast negative repercussions on queer self-identification in America in the mid-twentieth century. In this context, many homosexuals no doubt consciously attempted to eliminate or hide their sexual orientation. The climate was made considerably worse by linking homosexuals, who were already thought to be sexual deviants, to sex crimes in general, as well as sex crimes perpetrated against children and adolescents. Public fear of 47 homosexual predators and perverts increased, and influenced physicians and psychologists to develop “techniques to avert homosexuality in their patients. These included nausea-inducing aversion therapies, electroshock treatments, castrations, and lobotomies, all of which became much more common in the late 1930s and 1940s” (Terry

294). The evidence of many of the medical treatments endured by homosexuals in the

United States during the twentieth century is particularly horrendous when considered today. Terry reports that “in 1937, Atlanta doctor Newdigate Owensby experimented on male and female homosexuals using convulsive shock induced by Metrazol, a chemical stimulant. Owensby claimed success in administering the drug to induce seven to ten grand mal seizures per patient, thus eliminating all homosexual desires in a number of them” (295). This type of treatment to redirect or remedy purported abnormal sexual orientation would be considered criminally abusive in the United States in the twenty- first century.

In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes features a cast of eclectic protagonists who are sexual and gender misfits. The characters Robin, Nora, Jenny, and Doctor Matthew

O’Connor all suffer emotionally and socially because of their divergence from traditional sexuality and/or gender expression. Nightwood was published during an era when medical discourses commonly referred to homosexuality by sexological classification and theories, particularly the concept of the invert. Sexologists believed that homosexuals were outwardly physically identifiable and, based on this assumption, developed a purported scientific taxonomy of specific characteristics attributable to sexual deviants. In the 1930s, 48

[s]cience and medicine had established themselves as the mechanisms for

solving social problems, and elite institutions dedicated to preserving the

traditional social order, like Rockefeller Foundation, funneled millions of

dollars into hard, scientific research. Until the 1960s, when political

movements once again organized around issues of sex and gender,

scientific sexology was a major option for individuals who needed

information or help with sexual problems. (Phillips and Reay 329)

In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes addresses some of the consequences resulting from negative medical stereotypes and taxonomies of homosexuality like those created by Krafft-

Ebbing. Through a night-time lens that captures and highlights the excess and depravity of the seedy underbelly of Paris, Barnes’s modernist novel exposes the fallacies of the medical theories relating to homosexuality at the time of publication. By exclusively showcasing a cast of misfits, Barnes demonstrates that none of the characters are misfits—since they have their otherness and lack of belonging in common. Contemporary author Jeanette Winterson says of Nightwood that “all the characters are exiles of one kind or another—Americans, Irish, Austrian, Jewish. This is the beginning of the modern diaspora—all peoples, all places, all change” (N. pag.). Nightwood succeeds in demonstrating that regardless of sexuality, gender identity, career, or social status, people display, whether publicly or privately, strange peculiarities. In this way, Barnes successfully shows that homosexuals are not so unlike heterosexuals.

The characters in Nightwood highlight the negative pitfalls of turn-of-the-century homosexuality in a gothic and grotesque portrayal of the sexual underworld of Paris.

While Barnes does appropriate the medical, particularly psychoanalytic, tropes of the 49 time and incorporate them in her characterizations of the lesbian characters in Nightwood in order to ultimately disprove them, she does not present a possible normative homosexual love affair or relationship. Instead, Barnes argues for the validity of homosexuality by demonstrating the glaring ridiculousness of taxonomic claims by the psychiatric and medical communities. Therefore, while the lesbian-identified characters in Nightwood end up appearing certifiably insane, Barnes’s narrative may be interpreted as a mechanism to demonstrate not what is factual or proof of negative personality characteristics of lesbians, but rather how any individual may react to the type of repression, silencing, and bigotry that homosexuals generally faced in the early twentieth century. As mentioned previously, Foucault claims that the authority wielded by the medical, psychiatric, and legal communities create and function together as a discourse of truth (Psychiatric 335). In a similar vein, Barnes’s novel grapples with this discursive truth. She uses language in an arguably deviant way for a novel that at times resembles poetry more than prose. Christine Coffman writes that “by miming the distortions of schizophrenia, Barnes’s novel interrogates at the level of language the psychoanalytic accounts of the psyche whose casting of lesbianism as psychosis is a source of its characters’ psychical pain” (106). By moving away from or contorting conventional prose use and storytelling, and through precise and articulate language that frequently contradicts itself, Barnes creates a dichotomy that calls into question the psychoanalytic classifications of queer-identified individuals that were prevalent at the time of

Nightwood’s publication. The authoritative medical language is additionally distorted by the questionable insights of the quack doctor. Through O’Connor, gothic excess and 50 modernist language use, Barnes appropriates the medical discourse, and in doing so, challenges the notion of truth associated with medical authority.

Barnes alludes to the sexological and psychoanalytical notions of lesbian insanity throughout her novel, and uses her characters to challenge the popular theories that demonized homosexuality. Along the theoretical lines of sexology, lesbians were presumed to be mentally or physically ill—either a weakness of will was imagined to be present, or a congenital brain abnormality that caused the individual to not express sexuality in the correct or expected fashion, i.e., in a heterosexual relationship. In

Nightwood, O’Connor contextualizes the plight of lesbianism when “in an almost professional voice” (82), he asks: “love of woman for a woman, what insane passion for unmitigated anguish and motherhood brought that into the mind?” (82). Barnes’s lesbian characters struggle with the “insane passion” they feel for other women in a society that overall was not comfortable with or accepting of same-sex sexuality. At times, Barnes demonstrates this struggle literally with physical aggression between the homosexual characters: “then Jenny struck Robin, scratching and tearing in hysteria, striking, clutching and crying” (83). Both Jenny and Nora exhibit an obsessive and detrimental passion for Robin, and Barnes highlights their destructive behaviours as examples of the expected conduct for lesbians to exhibit at the time of the novel’s publication. Despite the pleas for acceptance of “deviant” sexuality throughout the novel, the characters exhibit traits and behaviours that are typically associated with instability—they are generally anxious, have difficulties in their personal lives, and are characterized by maladjusted sexual relationships that they exacerbate because of their own emotional volatility.

Additionally, by at times acting sharply emotional and jealously possessive of 51

Robin, Nora and Jenny draw the reader’s attention to the similarities between lesbianism and a falsely stereotypical view of heterosexuality that presumes the female partner to be capable of emotionally erratic behaviour. In this way, invert theories such as those by

Krafft-Ebing are brought to mind since Robin could fit the diagnosis of the true invert who takes on the male role, whereas Nora and Jenny fall into the female role and rather than being truly inverted are prey to the predatory “masculine” Robin. This form of sexological theorising promotes a binary male/female assumption by extending this binary to the interpretation of same-sex partnerships, and in doing so denies the validity of female/female or male/male relationships. Barnes, however, through her use of gothic excess, rather than simply showcasing a binary view of lesbian relationships turns this notion on its head by drawing the stereotypes to a point of ridiculousness and by breaking the socially expected rule of monogamy. Robin is faithful to neither Nora nor Jenny, and while this may be argued in a heterosexist light as evidence for her masculine characteristics, that Robin makes no excuses for her non-monogamy paradoxically points not only to the possibility of sexual excess, but also to the reality of various and variant sexualities. Robin refuses to be characterised by simple interpretation of sexological theories, and in this way she disproves the medical “truth” of homosexual classification, and potentially the ability to obtain a standard taxonomy of sexuality at all.

Barnes’s novel is particularly effective at highlighting the personal effects of the social ostracization and stigma that homosexuals experienced as a result of the disease classification of homosexuality at the time of the novel’s publication. Winterson states that Nightwood is effective because of the way the novel conveys meaning: “it is the shifting, slipping, relative world of Einstein and the modernists, the twin assault by 52 science and art on what we thought we were sure of” (N. pag.). Barnes’s characterization of Doctor Matthew O’Connor illustrates particularly well the potential for breakdown between medical and psychological theory and actual practice when dealing with homosexual individuals. In the chapters “Watchman, what of the night?” and “Go down,

Matthew,” O’Connor is the major speaker—he serves as a link between the characters and a source of philosophical advice. Yet O’Connor is an unlicensed doctor, and so a

“quack,” who struggles with his emotional health, along with personal confusion over his gender and sexual orientation. He is a doctor who helps to heal other people, yet he is helpless to the medical and societal prejudices that prevent him from being able to openly accept and live publicly according to his gender and sexual identity. Coffman eloquently states that

the much-noted mockery of medical authority in Nightwood, accomplished

through the privileging of the pseudodiagnostic voice of the “quack”

gynecologist, Matthew O’Connor, foregrounds precisely the politics of

medical authority that render questionable the diagnosis of “psychosis,”

and, in turn, the construction of the “psychotic lesbian.” (131)

O’Connor’s breakdown epitomizes the struggles faced by ostracized homosexuals and transsexuals in the early 1900s, and also serves to highlight the gap between medical diagnosis and actual lived experience.

As stated earlier, sexological theory and the notion of the invert, originally put forth by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, was largely brought to the public through Radclyffe

Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness. In Nightwood, Doctor O’Connor, like Stephen in

The Well, views sexuality as innate, and hence inescapable. He laments that “the more 53 you go against your nature, the more you will know of it” (Barnes 172). The lengths to which O’Connor goes to with his dress and make-up when he is alone in his apartment late at night speaks to the degree to which he is silenced during the daytime, and in public. O’Connor elucidates: “I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed” (Barnes 172). He performs this ritual of getting “dolled up”—a ritual that one, who was inclined to carry out today, would ordinarily undertake before a public outing—before he goes to bed at night because it would be considered indecent for him to go to work or to leave his apartment dressed in women’s clothing.

O’Connor is trapped in a destructive cyclic battle in which he cannot be himself in public, yet he cannot escape his desire to dress as a woman or his yearnings to live as a woman, even though his desires are socially unacceptable for a man. Miriam Fuchs analyses

Doctor O’Connor’s breakdown and says that contrary to the expected role of a doctor,

O’Connor does not triumph as

the healer and guardian of his patients’ emotional and physical well being.

His personal anguish seems equal to theirs, and his link to ancient

traditions of healing is made to appear ludicrous and deceptive. His loss of

humor and of sustaining medical treatment is followed by his literal

collapse as he does not even have the strength to hold up his own body,

much less that of a patient. (129)

Fuchs further adds that in Nightwood there is a “focus on suffering and the need to be healed” (125). All of the primary characters in the novel suffer from some type of illness:

“Robin is afflicted with somnambulism; her son Guido is born with an unexplained mental deficiency; Matthew O’Connor seems schizophrenic” (Fuchs 125). The characters 54 are all essentially presented as though they are sleepwalking—unable to function productively in any aspect of their lives. Fuchs adds that “each affliction is instead an additional metaphor for the loss of control and predictability, and each method of healing serves as a metaphor for regaining control. When the healer himself, Dr. Matthew

O’Connor, is overcome by illness and cannot effect a cure, Barnes’s statement of twentieth-century civilization becomes clear” (125). In addition, Barnes suggests through the healer who cannot cure himself that the disease of homosexuality is a falsehood.

O’Connor expresses concisely how easily the norm of heterosexuality can perpetuate and police itself by stating that “ritual itself constitutes an instruction” (Barnes 159).

Essentially, the regime of medical and psychiatric authority create a truth that functions in a cycle that reaffirms itself through other social authorities such as law and religion and it becomes habit to police one’s social conformity, or in other words, to police one’s conformity to heterosexuality.

The confusing or blending of identities of homosexual and transsexual is a common thread in the novel, possibly because of the difficulty medical and psychological theorists in the early twentieth century had in placing homosexuality within heterosexist beliefs of normality and a rigid gender binary. Therefore, all forms of deviation from heterosexuality were labeled as a manifestation of homosexuality. Speaking to Nora about the doll that Robin coveted, O’Connor pontificates that

the last doll, given to age, is the girl who should have been a boy, and the

boy who should have been a girl! The love of that last doll was

foreshadowed in that love of the first. The doll and the immature have

something right about them, the doll because it resembles but does not 55

contain life, and the third sex because it contains life but resembles the

doll. (157)

This passage can be interpreted as though O’Connor is speaking of a transsexual individual rather than a lesbian. He may be confusing, or clarifying, the discrepancy in medical diagnoses of inversion. By stating that “the doll and the immature have something right about them,” O’Connor is alluding to the simple honesty of being true to oneself. When taking into account psychoanalytic theories of the time that pointed to immaturity as a characteristic attributable to homosexuals, the use of immature in this instance in the novel can be interpreted as referring to either a child or as a homosexual.

Just as Robin’s animal likeness brings her closer to her nature, the doll and the immature can be construed as ultimate representations of honest identity. Additionally, by referring to the homosexual as the immature and therefore by using the direct nomenclature of psychoanalysts, Barnes argues against the medical regime. Rather than attributing immaturity as a negative characteristic linked to criminality and sexual abuse, Barnes uses the term to point to simple honesty—she interprets the homosexual as one who has

“something right about them.”

In Nightwood, Nora and Robin’s home is littered with symbolism of the broken, scattered, and unstable aspects of their lives. Barnes presents her lesbian protagonists as illustrations both of what the psychological societal expectations were of lesbians at that time, as well as the personal emotional fall-out that could result from harsh and incorrect medical judgment or labeling. Winterson declares that

Robin’s passivity, Jenny's predatory nature, and Nora’s passionate

devotion make an impossible triangle. The daily assaults of selfishness 56

and self-harm do not offer a picture of love between women as anything

safe or easy. A negative reading would sink us into the misery of the

“invert”; the medical pathology of Havelock Ellis, and the bitterness of

Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness. (N. pag.)

At Nora and Robin’s apartment in Paris, Barnes describes their courtyard as follows:

“looking from the long windows one saw a fountain figure, a tall granite woman bending forward with lifted head; one hand was held over the pelvic round as if to warn a child who goes incautiously” (60-61). This example is a particularly poignant example of the sin and depravity that was presumed to be associated with same-sex sexuality. The granite statue is in essence a warning to people—especially presumably vulnerable and impressionable people such as young children and adolescents—that they ought to tread cautiously because some kind of evil or danger is afoot. The fear elicited by the statue plays into the incorrect and bigoted notion that homosexuals were—or at least had the potential to be—manipulative sexual predators. The granite statue gives the reader the impression that it is a form of warning such as might be at a haunted house.

The ceramic doll that Robin covets, cares for, and then destroys in an unexplained fit of rage is also symbolic of the existence that she feels she cannot have as a lesbian, the life she is missing out on because her sexuality has been labeled as unnatural and distasteful. Nora says of Robin to Doctor O’Connor the following: “sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—‘our child’—high above her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face” (156). Robin acts out the torment of the invert in her boy’s clothes—she does not fit in, she does not know how to 57 have the family she yearns for, so she purchases a replica baby doll for her and Nora to care for. The way Robin acts out her longing for a child of her own with a surrogate child’s toy again brings to mind psychoanalytic theories of the early twentieth century that put forth the claim that homosexuality was an expression of immaturity. These theories suggested that the individual had not developed properly and hence sought relationships that were somehow less fulfilling or valid than the status quo “mature” heterosexual relationships, hence Robin’s obsession with a doll rather than a human baby of her own.

It becomes apparent through historical documentation of the intersection between medicine and homosexuality that fears of the potential dangers of the “lesbian menace” served to ignite public concern over personal safety and the potential criminal victimization that homosexuals could pose to alleged normal heterosexuals and vulnerable youth, which in turn informed legal and political actions to curb or eliminate homosexuality. It is noteworthy that O’Connor says to Nora: “you, who are blood-thirsty with love” (Barnes 157). By having the doctor address Nora as “blood-thirsty,” Barnes draws attention to the familiar gothic predatory notion of “monstrosity and vampirism”

(Horner and Zlosnik 78) associated with the lesbian in early twentieth-century accounts of homosexuality. It was common in literature that “lesbians were presented in the cliché of sexual vampires who seduced innocent young women into sexual experimentation that would lead them, like a drug, into the usual litany of horrors: addiction, degeneracy, loneliness, murder and suicide” (Faderman, Odd Girls 151). This recognizable anecdote of the rapacious lesbian was supported by medical and psychoanalytic theories that posited that homosexuals were sexually reckless and insatiable. Terry confirms that, “as 58 political campaigns for women’s rights intensified around the turn of the century, medical discourse warnings of the dangers of lesbianism increased” (65). In order to support assertions for legally subduing, punishing, or treating homosexuals, politicians and law enforcement agents turned to predominantly theoretical medical and psychiatric science for evidence to back up their claims.

Gothic notions of the lesbian vampire and the criminally insane are combined and flaunted in Barnes’s characterizations in Nightwood. The overall atmosphere of the narrative is precarious, haunting, dream-like, and unstable. Horner and Zlosnik describe the Paris that is represented in the novel as “dark and labyrinthine: a Gothic space in which the boundaries of an everyday reality threaten to dissolve” (79). Barnes uses the gothic elements to destabilise purported normal conventions and life in her portrayal of

Paris and alternate sexualities. The characters demarcate instability and the carnivalesque by employing grotesque gothic excess in order to intensify the stereotypes of homosexuality to the point of comedy. Barnes uses the macabre and the animalistic in a

Poe-esque eerie nightmare fashion such that “one becomes aware of references to demons, cabalistic and automatic writing, vampires, ghosts, blood, occult books, and somnambulism” (Tyler-Bennett 102). The type of gothic portrayal on which Barnes leans is such that Deborah Tyler-Bennett claims that it “owes a clear debt to expressionist cinema” (102). In addition to expressionist cinema, one can also draw a connection between Barnes’s horror-like portrayal of the dangerous nightlife of the homosexual to

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense horror films such as Psycho, in which the ordinary is distorted and the morbid is accentuated. Unlike Hitchcock, who draws on everyday fears to amplify fright for the sake of entertainment, Barnes employs gothic monstrosity in 59 order to dismiss or dispel the medical othering of homosexuality. Barnes uniquely exploits gothic devices to critique the pathologizing of lesbianism, and hence demonstrate the consequences associated with the harmful medical discourse of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Through her over-the-top portrayal of homosexual stereotypes, Barnes showcases the laughable medical demonizing of alternate sexualities, and the social side-effects of this on individual lives. Not only was it not socially acceptable to be in a same-sex sexual relationship, but one could be socially ostracized for simply expressing feelings of, or an inclination toward, homosexuality. Nora explains her feelings for Robyn to Doctor

O’Connor by stating, “I love her as one condemned to it” (146). Nora’s words are particularly poignant since no doubt some homosexuals in the early twentieth century would have viewed their sexuality as a prison term or death sentence. Nora’s statement that “there’s something evil in me that loves evil and degradation” (144) is her own self- deprecating method of interpreting her sexuality. What she really loves is women, but the medical doctrine at the time promoted the notion that same-sex love was evil and degrading. Nora declares that “Robin’s love and mine was always impossible, and loving each other, we no longer love. Yet we love each other like death” (148). So, contrary to what one may expect of romantic love, Nora states that she “was not a danger to her, but someone who might understand her torture” (150). The “torture” that Nora speaks of is directly related to the struggles both she and Robin experience due to the negative associations that had at the time been falsely linked to homosexuality. The difficulty in expressing their lesbianism is clearly relatively easier—though still taboo—in the secretive night-time community of Paris in contrast to the more puritanical morality 60 purported in the United States, but the difficulty in being open about alternate sexual orientation is still evident in that Robin could only be open late at night and in certain company.

By linking Robin so strongly to nature, Barnes implies that Robin’s gender and/or her sexuality are linked to nature. Robin’s closeness to her animal nature makes obvious the naturalness of her being—hence, homosexuality is normalized through its base animalistic presentation. Barnes challenges the reader to view Robin’s androgyny, her non-monogamy, and her sexuality as instinctual. Barnes manages to capture the homosexual, the gender queer, and the transsexual as flawed and human, like all other people. As Winterson eloquently states, “humans suffer and, gay or straight, they break themselves into pieces, blur themselves with drink and drugs, choose the wrong lover, crucify themselves on their own longings and, let's not forget, are crucified by a world that fears the stranger—whether in life or in love” (N. pag.). Barnes exacerbates the stereotypes in an excessive and gothic manner that functions to highlight the dark and dangerous world of the sexual outcast, and by doing so proves that the classification of the dangerous or criminally insane homosexual is ludicrous. She uses language in an unexpected and arguably deviant manner, she exploits the misfit/deviant qualities of the characters and their romantic relationships, and she artistically confuses the psychical and the physical in order to supplant realism, and hence, exploit and disprove middle-class norms and beliefs about the truths delivered from medical and psychiatric authorities.

B) 1950s / VIN PACKER SPRING FIRE

In the mid-twentieth-century, medical experts such as Kinsey began to acknowledge that there may be more than one variation of normal within sexuality, and that these deviations do not have to fall under the blanket of heterosexuality. This period marks an important period of shift, although not necessarily a positive one, in medical and psychiatric theories of homosexuality. Adams asserts that

in contemporary sexual politics, the 1950s are the standard against which

some conservatives measure changes in the organization of sexuality. The

mores of that decade sit as a kind of benchmark, a symbol of how far

North Americans have travelled since morality was “as it should be,” with

clear gender roles in every household and heterosexual conjugal

monogamy as the primary form of partnership. (3)

For this reason, it is important to study the factors that influenced the typical standards of morality in America in the 1950s and deconstruct the multiple significances that these standards had then, and how they continue to influence aspects and “truths” of medical doctrine, laws, politics, and art today.

Among the striking differences between Barnes’s modernist novel, Nightwood, and Vin Packer’s pulp fiction novel, Spring Fire, is the accessibility of Spring Fire. In the preface to Nightwood, Jeanette Winterson states that “reading it is mainly the preserve of academics and students” (Barnes ix), and in its introduction, T.S. Eliot states that

Nightwood “is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it” (xviii). Therefore, there is a presumption that today Nightwood is a text primarily read and understood by academics. It is an experimental text that requires the 62 contemporary reader to not only have at least a basic comprehension of modernist techniques, but also the desire to read a work that is weighty in topic and delivery of narrative. Barnes uses linguistic deviance to represent deviant characters in her novel, and in so doing she appropriates medical language and stereotypes and successfully disproves them by proving their ludicrousness. In contrast, Vin Packer’s novel Spring Fire, by nature of its classification as pulp fiction, was written with the intention of simplicity of reading and mass market appeal. Spring Fire was published during a time of intense turmoil for homosexuals living in the United States. As a mass-market pulp fiction paperback, it is possible that Spring Fire was able to gain popularity and success partly because the pulp fiction genre was generally frowned upon as literary fluff or histrionic drama that was meant to thrill and entertain rather than being a serious work of substance.

Following theories grounded in sexology and psychoanalysis, in

a growing genre of exploitation novels and pulp nonfiction exposés of the

time, authors similarly described lesbian relationships as pathological

approximations of family relations between “husbands” and “wives,”

“mothers” and “daughters,” and even in some relationships between

“femme” mothers and “butch sons.” The predator was most often a

masculine woman but could disguise this by appearing to be maternal. To

a great degree, both public and private spheres came to be regarded as

equally endangered by dangerous trends that allowed male and female

perversion to flourish. (Terry 321)

Pulp novels such as these served to perpetuate the negative stereotypes and labeling associated with homosexuality. A large number of the pulp novels of the 1950s that had 63 homosexual protagonists were sensational stories intended to titillate and shock with their taboo subject matter. Indeed, Stryker writes that “paperbacks with reasonably sympathetic stories actually written by lesbian authors constituted only a tiny fraction of the more than two thousand lesbian-themed mass-market books published in the 1940s,

‘50s and ‘60s” (Queer Pulp 61). One of the main selling features of lesbian pulp fiction was no doubt the melodramatic soap opera-like exaggeration of the “lesbian menace” that fed into the climate of moral panic in the United States in the heyday of pulp fiction.

Terry points out that “a growing climate of homophobia, stoked by Cold War xenophobia, was fueled by the specter of ‘strangers in our midst.’ A fear of dangerous conspiracies, secretive infiltration, and uncontrolled sexual perversion led to the passage of laws against sex offenders that painted a picture of the homosexual as a member of a clandestine underworld” (323). Many of the laws that were passed in the United States in and around the 1950s were intentionally oppressive and served as frightening deterrents to homosexual expression.

Among the implications evident with the switch from studying lesbian-identified literature within literary modernism to pulp fiction is the persistent portrayal of the homosexual in a carnivalesque light. There is a distinct carnival and freak show aspect to

Barnes’s portrayal of the gay nightlife in Paris that, while distinct in its imagery, is also partly transferable to the animalistic portrayal of lesbianism that runs through Nightwood,

Spring Fire, and Rubyfruit Jungle, and to the portrayal of the village and its dance clubs in New York City, as it is presented as a haven (particularly at night) in Rita Mae

Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. There is a penchant for the exotic and dangerous in the portrayal of lesbian identity in each novel that vacillates between both the homophobic 64 and homoerotic—Robin, Mitch, and Molly are each compared to dangerous animals with little to no self control: Robin, in an aggressive showdown with a dog, “began to bark also, crawling after him” (Barnes 179); Casey sneers and says that Mitch “belongs in a cage!” (Packer 119); and Carrie says to Molly, “you’re wild, some wild animal” (Brown

32). Therefore, while there may be progression in the light in which homosexuals are represented in Barnes’s novel from the 1930s to Packer’s in the 1950s and Brown’s in the

1970s, homosexuals in all three works are associated with the notion of “freaks and dandies” that we see in Barnes’s earlier work, and each novel highlights, along with its appropriation or denial of harmful medical discourse, the advantages of conforming to socially accepted heterosexual ideals.

Foucault’s panopticon as a metaphor of disciplinary and social surveillance is a valuable implement to break down and understand the ways in which societal authoritarian forces functioned together in the 1950s to perpetuate heteropatriarchal ideals. This regime of surveillance governs the narrative and characterization of Spring

Fire. At the same time, it can be shown that Packer’s novel undermines the representation of compulsory heterosexuality. On the cusp of major social changes, there was a palpable tension in America in the 1950s that is evident in lesbian pulp fiction novels. These novels clearly portray the medical, psychiatric, and moral majority opinions on homosexuality in accordance with censorship laws. However, lesbian and gay audiences could gather from the subtle clues within the works that many authors were pleading for a re-evaluation of what constituted normal, and hence socially acceptable, sexuality.

Michelle Ann Abate concedes that “lesbian-themed paperbacks formed part of what Joel

Foreman has termed the ‘Other’ Fifties, or the subversive social underbelly and myriad 65 countercultural movements lurking beneath the decade’s smiling conformity” (231). It is this contradiction that causes the novels to be both promoters of narrow right-wing views of family and sexuality, while also serving as beacons of hope and upcoming change for the oppressed sexual minority. Homosexual readers of pulp fiction novels such as Spring

Fire were preached to in the pages of their beloved books about the immorality, sinful nature, and medical illness of their sexuality, and were frequently reminded of the social policing that was rampant throughout communities in the United States. The tension comes into play when considering that there were virtually no other works at that time in which homosexual readers could see a fictional depiction of their lives. Additionally, in such a climate of hostility readers would likely relate to the bigoted hateful treatment of homosexuals, as the novels do mirror the medical discourses of the time. So in analysing these works, we must take into account the historical climate at the time of their publication since what we may view today as horribly shame-inducing hate speech was a reality for most readers. Susan Stryker confirms that Spring Fire, “in spite of the obligatory downbeat ending, managed to represent lesbianism as a more or less unremarkable aspect of some college women’s campus life, and to at least hint at the possibility that, however badly it worked out at the time, a healthy lesbian relationship was not entirely unthinkable” (Queer Pulp 57). So the hidden gem that works such as

Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series and Vin Packer’s Spring Fire offered to queer readers was firstly a glimpse of themselves in a political climate that sought to erase them, as well as the occasional positive, healthy, and happy representation of same-sex sexuality hidden within the dominant discourses of hate and shame. 66

Much of the narrative of Spring Fire takes place at an American university in a sorority. The setting of a sorority is important because it places the story in a common

American situation in which multiple young women live and spend a great deal of time together. The sorority is ideal for reinforcing social conformity and surveillance, and to inject the fear of surveillance into the minds of homosexuals. Due to the realism of the sorority and the fears in the United States of the potential contagion or contamination that for a time was presumed to be transferable from homosexuals to “normal” heterosexuals, the sorority, as well as the all girls’ school, is a much used locale for lesbian-themed novels. Michelle Ann Abate writes that “Leda’s revelation in Spring Fire that she is the

‘true’ lesbian traffics in this fear. The young woman has infiltrated a stronghold of

American heterosexuality—the college sorority house—and ‘perverted’ one of its members” (241). This invasive moral panic was such a normative framework and tool for the spread of the fear of the theoretical homosexual menace that the sorority or dormitory setting is a topos in many twentieth-century novels with lesbian or gay protagonists, including in Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle.

The fear of being alone with a homosexual and hence vulnerable to “deviant” sexual predation was promoted in the climate of panic following World War II in the

United States. The theory was that, as individuals who were already morally compromised, homosexuals were easily corruptible in additional ways. By supporting this idea that queer individuals were potentially dangerous, psychoanalysts led many heterosexuals to fear the purported homosexual menace. Martha Craven Nussbaum elucidates that within the United States military, similar to the sorority scenarios in pulp fiction novels, “the real issue that keeps coming up is that heterosexual males do not want 67 to be forced to associate intimately with gay males, especially to be seen naked by them.

The psychology of this intense fear of the gaze of the homosexual is interesting. (It has even been attempted as a legal defense in gay-bashing cases, under the description

‘homosexual panic’)” (198). In the military, as in the sorority house, the fear was so pervasive and inflated, that it is clear from the language, such as “no telling what she might do at the dorm” (Spring Fire 120), that people did not know what the homosexual menace would actually do to them, yet their terror was ingrained and tangible. Marsha warns that they “can’t have her getting out in the halls” (121), and “Leda felt queasy, listening to them picture Mitch as a wild beast roaming the halls for prey” (122). This reaction of panic to the potential danger the girls feel Mitch poses can be startling when compared to current views on homosexuality.

Read in a historical light, however, it is not surprising that the other girls in the sorority reacted with fear and apprehension to the presence of two lesbians in their dormitory. After all, the authoritative medical and psychological regime in the 1950s corroborated with and furthered dogmatic claims of homosexual insanity and moral corruption to produce “truths” that functioned to stoke irrational Cold War fears in the

United States to such a degree that homosexuals were often painted as an enemy to

American family values and ideals. Paired with the psychoanalytic assertion that homosexuals were immature, and hence vulnerable to further corruption and blackmail, the average heterosexual American citizen was taught in the mid-twentieth century to dread the dangers, regardless of how irrational they were, of the homosexual menace.

Today, there are still echoes of these illogical fears that root back to early medical and psychiatric pathological diagnoses of queer individuals. Proponents of the Defense of 68

Marriage Act (DOMA) fear that if afforded equal legal rights, homosexuals could damage traditional American family values. DOMA, which was adopted in the United

States in 1996, “prohibited recognition of any marriage except one between a man and a woman” (David G. Savage N. pag.). On July 29, 2013, the Supreme Court ruled against one part of DOMA and “struck down a 1990s-era federal law that denied all legal recognition to the tens of thousands of same-sex couples who have been legally married in the last decade” (Savage N. pag.). While this ruling carries a great deal of hope for equality for homosexuals, it is still an early step towards equal legal rights in a country in which same-sex marriage is currently legal in fewer than one quarter of states (Caitlin

Stark and Amy Roberts N. pag.). DOMA is evidence that the medical pathologizing of sexuality has had long-reaching consequences.

Similar to most mass market lesbian-identified pulp fiction novels of the 1950s,

Spring Fire does not end with a happy ending for the lesbian characters. In her introduction to the novel, Packer writes that “at the end one woman goes mad, while the other realizes she had never really loved her in the first place” (vii). This is a standard ending for lesbian novels of the mid-twentieth century, since there were censorship laws in place that deemed homosexuality perverse, so authors of homosexual themes were forced to abide by the strict rules in presenting deviant sexuality. The method around the censors was for authors to write about homosexuality while avoiding glamorizing it— hence there were unhappy endings for the gay characters that almost inevitably involved the lovers committing suicide, being committed to a mental institution, or finding at the end of the story that they were heterosexual after all. Packer writes that 69

although the word gay was becoming popular among us, it had not yet been

mainstreamed. There were no magazines or newspapers about us, no clubs for

us to belong to. Books written about us were very few with small print orders,

and not reviewed in major publications. We were never mentioned in radio

dramas or soap operas and needless to say as television got started, we were

not in the scripts. The church and synagogues called us sinners, as they still

do, and the law called us criminals. We had no legitimacy. (vii-viii)

Yet, in this time of lesbian invisibility, there was a desire for visibility, as is clearly evident by the fact that Spring Fire “sold 1,463,917 copies in its first printing” (viii).

Packer calls Spring Fire a part of lesbian history (xi) because it was through the mixed messages, voyeurism, and melodramatic nature of pulp fiction that homosexuality first became widely known in mainstream literature in the United States.

The influence of the psychiatric disease model of homosexuality is clear throughout Spring Fire. The heterosexual characters refer to lesbians as “obviously demented!” (120), “violent” (121), “wild beast[s]” (122), and “savage[s]” (129). The girls in the sorority are “horror-stricken” (139) upon finding out that there are lesbians in their house, and claim “it’d ruin us” (141). They believe that Leda is “very ill—in her mind as well as in her body” (142). Compounding the way that non-homosexuals categorize lesbians in the novel, the homosexual characters exhibit the distress of internalized homophobia, feelings of shame, and embarrassment in relation to their sexuality. Mitch thinks that “there was something wrong and ill in the two of them” (61), or that “a lesbian was abnormal” (83). She adds: “I know for sure what’s wrong with me” (105). The characters in the novel uniformly, regardless of sexuality, come to the conclusion—in 70 keeping with medical discourse—that lesbianism is a disease. All of Mitch’s internal messages about her sexuality involve feelings of embarrassment and a belief—fed by the social forces of medicine, law, and religion—that homosexuality is wrong: “she felt dirty when Leda told her that she was a Lesbian. . . . she did not want to be one. Feeling

“abnormal” (123), and as “a slow self-disgust chewed at her” (124), “she was ashamed of the way she thought about Leda” (125). With the pronouncements from psychoanalysts at the time concerning the mental instability, immaturity, and potential criminality of lesbians, it is no wonder that Mitch has internalized these judgment categories. In fact, many of the lesbian readers of Spring Fire may have related to Mitch’s kneejerk shame and self-hatred.

When Mitch and Leda are discovered in a passionate embrace by Casey and

Kitten, the simplest defense Leda gives for the witnessed lesbian behaviour is that Mitch is sick. Leda says that “the best thing for her to do is to go to the Psych Department”

(120), and relays to Mitch, “I said you were sick” (125). This explanation makes perfect sense to Casey and Kitten, who have internalized the medical tropes of homosexual sickness. With sensational melodrama, in the last pages of the novel, Mother Nesselbush announces to the girls in the sorority that “Leda Taylor has had a complete nervous breakdown” and that “she’ll have to go to an institution” (158). While on the surface, it reads as questionable that Leda is taken to a mental institution following the car accident,

Abate explains that “in keeping with 1950s views that homosexuality is a form of psychopathology, this disclosure causes Leda to be taken to the university’s mental hospital instead of its medical one” (241). The pressing matter requiring treatment is

Leda’s lesbianism, which is notably treated under a regime of psychiatric surveillance. 71

The novel ends with an explanation that would pass the censors whose aim was to avoid positive portrayals of homosexuality: Leda is sent to an “asylum” (159), and Mitch understands that she is happier with Lucifer than Leda. Spring Fire closes with Mitch thinking: “it was true what she had told Leda yesterday. She didn’t hate her. She didn’t hate her at all, and she knew then that she never really loved her” (160). While this ending may have pleased censorship laws, it was no doubt comedic to many homosexual readers who would have been aware of the rules pertaining to homosexuality and printed material. Stryker affirms the

careful attention many mid-twentieth century lesbian readers paid to

lesbian-themed mass-market paperbacks, their hunger for affirming

representations, their ability to tease out subtextual sympathies in books

that were often overtly homophobic and misogynistic, and their loyal

appreciation for authors who expressed carefully coded support for the

kind of lives they led. (Queer Pulp 58)

Savvy readers would have deciphered Packer’s clues that Leda and Mitch did genuinely love one another. The ending of Spring Fire is so sensational that readers looking for subtext beyond the heterosexist rhetoric could effortlessly garner that Mitch and Leda’s love could not be glossed over in a mere couple of pages that simply state that Leda had

“a complete nervous breakdown” (158) and Mitch found her direction with a boy whose namesake, notably, is the devil.

Packer adds a new spin to the image of the sex-crazed lesbian when Leda is uncovered as the predator and instigator of the two girls’ relationship. While horrifying, it is believable to the sorority sisters that Mitch—the tomboyish, plain, awkward girl with 72 poor fashion sense—is the “true” lesbian because of the trope of the lesbian menace displaying external masculine signifiers. This assumption is rooted in previous theories of homosexuals being gender inverted. By presenting Leda—the beautiful, fashionable, boy crazy prom queen—as the true lesbian, Packer addresses a new truth, and fear, that any woman can be a lesbian. That a “normal-looking” woman can be a lesbian added further fuel to the unthinkable fears that the lesbian menace could be anyone anywhere. Dr.

Peters furthers the fear of lesbian contagion by stating to Mitch that she “caught some of that sickness” (148) from Leda. Perhaps this contagion theory is one of the reasons that

Casey and Kitten want to keep Mitch and Leda’s relationship a secret—in addition to the public shame they would suffer, they may be terrified of catching the queer disease to which two of their house mates have succumbed.

Throughout the novel, there is a concerted effort by the characters to maintain the heterosexual status quo. Foucault argues that the sometimes seemingly unconscious goal of individual conformity to constructed sexuality norms is inherent in the medico-social construction of a taxonomy of sexuality that conforms to heteropatriarchal ideals.

Motivated by fear, at times Mitch and Leda police their own thoughts and desires. Leda says to Mitch that if Jan (Leda’s mother) “ever knew, I’d take a razor and slash my wrists” (112). It is unthinkable to Leda to be known as a “Queer,” yet it is comparatively accepted, and even valued that she drinks alcohol to excess and regularly breaks curfew because she is having sex with men. Leda flaunts her promiscuity with fraternity men in order to maintain her social image as a normal heterosexual. Mitch recognizes that “Leda did not love [Jake], and yet she persisted in being with him, always, as if he were a medicine or a drug” (77). It is as though Leda forces herself to have sex with Jake 73 repeatedly in order to learn to want to be with men—he is essentially her proof of heterosexuality and the medicine she takes daily in order to be perceived as normal. Even the Dean warns Mitch of the social consequences of lesbianism: “that kind of thing can’t be tolerated. In the long run, if it was tolerated, you’d be hurt terribly. There would be cruel jokes, and an even crueler alienation from the other girls” (130). The Dean is an adult with a position of power at the university, yet when faced with Mitch, she “was afraid of the girl in many ways” (132). Mitch represents fear of the unknown, as she is theoretically—according to medical and psychiatric doctrine of the time—afflicted with a dangerous, contagious, and debilitating physical and mental disease.

Despite the strict rules around publishing and obscenity in the 1950s, pulp fiction novels became the primary source of information on taboo subjects. Stryker states that

“paperbacks in the 1940s and ‘50s were undoubtedly the venue of choice for exploring and exploiting certain taboo topics disallowed in movies and radio and the pages of reputable hardcover books” (Queer Pulp 8). Authors succeeded in bypassing censors by adhering to rules while also appeasing homosexual readers. Stryker confirms that in the mid-twentieth century in the United States, the “Gathings Committee, a politically reactionary congressional investigation into the supposedly subversive influences of paperbacks” closely monitored publications as they were printed and moved through the postal system to ensure that, if homosexuality was present, there was an “emphasis on stories that drove home the generally tragic consequences of straying from a straight and narrow path” (Queer Pulp 51). It was no doubt easier for individuals who wanted to read the pulp novels to do so more covertly than if the information they sought was broadcast on television or the radio. Through reading queer pulp fiction, readers began to develop a 74 sense of kinship and community with other queer individuals—in essence, one of the most valuable tools the pulps gave homosexual readers was the knowledge that they were not alone. Anne Fausto-Sterling writes that “in response to police and moral reformers, self-consciousness about their sexual behaviors emerged—a budding sense of identity.

This forming identity contributed to its own medical rendering” (14). It is this sense of identity that lesbians and gay men sought in the representations of homosexuality in the pulp novels of the 1950s.

In moving from a study of Spring Fire (1952) to Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), one can visualize the transforming course of medical and psychological theorizing on homosexuality in the United States. Weeks writes that “from Freud to Kinsey we can see the tensions between behaviour and identity, private desire and public morality, dreams and reality, sexuality as presented and sexuality as lived” (Making Sexual History 6).

Indeed, in Spring Fire, the reader can garner the beginnings of a homosexual revolution in which more and more people come out of the closet and force a public reappraisal of sexual categorization and a recognition of harmful flawed diagnoses and attempted curative measures. In Rubyfruit Jungle, while the novel still portrays a generally bigoted and misogynistic environment, Molly navigates her world with a contemporary confidence, demanding acknowledgement and fair treatment. Despite the clear presence of primarily outspoken homophobia by other characters in the novel, Molly’s attitude represents massive social progress in America in only twenty-one years.

C) 1970s / RITA MAE BROWN RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE

For most of the twentieth century, it was both dangerous and difficult for authors to publish accounts of homosexuals that portrayed queer individuals in a light that was exclusively positive. As an illustration of the wide-reaching power of the medical and psychological community in the twentieth century, Jennifer Terry studied the results of two nationwide studies of public opinion on the perceived threat of homosexuality—one in 1966 and the other in 1970. Terry discovered that of the sample of 946 American adults taken in 1966, “one-third of the public believed homosexuality to be a social danger,” and in the study conducted in 1970, “two-thirds of 373 respondents believed that homosexuality was a ‘sickness,’ thirty-eight percent that it was ‘dangerous,’ and about twenty percent believed that homosexuals were sex inverted and thus distinguishable from the ‘normal’ population” (374). According to Terry, these studies reveal

the tenacity of assumptions dating back to medical and scientific discourse

from the early part of the century. In the latter half of the century, these

assumptions were woven into overt political reactions against lesbians and

gay men. Thus, homosexuality was not a mere curiosity in the margins of

society but was seen as a national problem to be brought under control.

(374)

Understandably, there were few accounts, whether fictional or nonfictional, of lesbian and gay existence before the mid-twentieth century that were written by homosexuals with the intent to capture some of the history. Instead, a notable number of the books written with homosexual characters or content in the early to mid-twentieth century consisted of trashy voyeuristic accounts of homosexuality written by authors who were 76 not members of the queer community, and these works were targeted at a thrill-seeking male heterosexual readership. Consequently, it can be both puzzling and frustrating to garner even a semi-accurate account of life for people in the United States in the twentieth century who did not conform to the socially accepted norms of sexuality.

Helena Michie states that “in 1977, when Bantam Books decided to reprint Rita Mae

Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, originally issued by the small feminist press Daughters

Publishing Company, the novel became the first bestseller with an explicitly lesbian theme and the first lesbian novel to make the crossover into the mainstream market”

(101). I will consider how Rita Mae Brown successfully employs Molly to demonstrate the inefficiency and flawed nature of broadly applying medically and psychologically derived stereotypes to a diverse group of people. Rather than appropriate the medical discourse in order to disprove it or argue against it as Djuna Barnes and Vin Packer have,

Rita Mae Brown lobbies for queer rights and legitimacy through a powerful, vocal protagonist. In Rubyfruit Jungle, Molly displaces the pathologizing medical discourse on homosexuals by invoking the civil rights discourse. Molly functions as a leader for both queer rights and women’s rights. She argues that all people deserve equality regardless of sexuality, gender, or race.

In some ways, Rubyfruit Jungle is not quite as daring as it may seem upon initial reading, considering the political and social situation for lesbians in the United States at the time of its publication. In fact, Rubyfruit Jungle follows in the footsteps of leaders of pro-lesbian literature, such as Ann Bannon, Vin Packer, and Radclyffe Hall, all of whom, previous to Rubyfruit Jungle, published novels with strong-willed, independent lesbian protagonists who fought for equality with heterosexuals and stood up for and were a 77 voice for the normalcy of homosexuality as best and daringly as they could in the political climates in which they were published. There are many clear similarities between Rubyfruit Jungle and other earlier lesbian-identified novels in which the authors strive to appropriate negative stereotypes, medical classifications, and religious doctrine in order to disprove them or draw attention to their simplicity and ineffectiveness at capturing such a broad portion of the population. Particularly, similarities in Rubyfruit

Jungle with Vin Packer’s Spring Fire and Ann Bannon’s classic Beebo Brinker series include the sorority setting with many girls in a confined space; the threat of homosexual conversion and corruption; the treatment of lesbianism as a severe illness by the heads of the educational institutions; guidance counselors presented as possible closeted lesbians; and the practice of dating an older, publicly heterosexual, married, rich female celebrity.

Hall, Packer, and Bannon also all uniquely appropriate the medical discourses of their times in an attempt to normalize homosexuality—even if the best they could do at the time was to justify, excuse, or plead for tolerance of homosexuality.

In Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown continues the literary tradition of engaging with the established medical discourse relating to homosexuality. In the novel, Molly’s mother, Carrie, says cuttingly to her adoptive daughter “you’re not my child. You’re wild, some wild animal. Your father must have been an ape or something” (32). This notion that Molly’s parentage may be simian or animalistic rather than human is suggested more than once in the novel, and can be compared to Barnes’s descriptions of her lesbian characters as animal-like. It is as though Molly is so wild and/or mentally diseased that Carrie cannot bear the notion of accepting such an embarrassment for a daughter. Even Molly’s friend Leroy turns on her and tries to force her into the role of an 78 acceptable and “normal” female, by saying, “I mean you ain’t natural, that’s what I mean.

It’s time you started worrying about your hair and doing those things that girls are supposed to do” (Brown 63). Molly’s independence, along with her confidence in her sexuality, threatens the other characters in the novel, who do not know what to make of a girl who is feisty and content to be a social misfit as long as she can champion equality.

These qualities in Molly are also strikingly different from the characterizations of Robin,

Nora, Mitch, and Leda, all of whom exhibit shame and embarrassment over their sexuality. Amid the overwhelming dissent from her friends and family, Molly fights for the right to love whomever she chooses, dress the way she likes, and study what suits her.

Rubyfruit Jungle is one of a handful of novels that vividly portray the struggle to be given equal rights to other humans that individuals identifying as homosexual have faced historically. Throughout the novel, Molly stands her ground, and she relays the clear message that she will continue to strive for justice and equality.

Through the daring and outspoken character of Molly, Brown is able to voice controversial topics. Molly stands up for herself and homosexual readers, saying to her best friend, “Leroy, you are harping very heavy on this queer thing. First you tell me I’m a queer, and now you are so worried everybody’s gonna think you’re one. You look like an ordinary person” (65). Brown attempts to break down the historical medical concept of the homosexual as sick not by appropriating medical discourse, but by appealing to the logic of the civil rights movement. Molly’s simple statement that Leroy looks like everyone else highlights that a person can be both homosexual and “normal.” This is drastically different to the propaganda earlier in the twentieth century—Molly states her claim without injecting the Cold War fear that typified America in 1950s and instead 79 employs the idea that the homosexual can be anyone and anywhere as a tactic to decrease fear and suspicion of others, and promote the normality of homosexuality. In essence,

Brown repackages the medical classification of homosexuality and removes the stigma associated with the term normal by attributing it to all people regardless of their sexual orientation.

In Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown effectively presents a startlingly strong and resilient lesbian character. Molly Bolt is essentially verbally abused throughout the course of her life as portrayed in the novel, yet she still manages to maintain a strong sense of self and of justice and equality. As a young girl, Molly’s adoptive mother, Carrie, chastises her for not being ladylike or like other girls. Carrie criticizes Molly’s preferences in clothing, friends, mannerisms, even school subjects and school-related activities. Carrie repeatedly blames Molly’s perceived shortcomings (not conforming to Carrie’s ideal of femininity) on the fact that Molly has been adopted. Carrie calls her a “bastard” and compares her to a wild animal: “You’re a heathen, that’s what you are. . . . You’re not my child. You’re wild, some wild animal. Your father must have been an ape or something” (Brown 32).

This accusation is significant because it highlights the stark difference that Carrie perceives between heterosexuals and homosexuals. As Carrie thinks that to be homosexual is a sin and against God’s will, she is mortified at the thought that other people could find out that her daughter is a lesbian. Because of her fears, Carrie attempts to distance herself from her adoptive daughter by stressing that she is not biologically related to her—Carrie’s claims that Molly is a bastard are attempts to maintain her dignity, with little to no concern for how these assertions may be harming Molly. 80

The contrast between Molly and her cousin Leroy highlights flaws associated with a societally constructed gender binary. Molly is naturally adept at skills that are accepted for boys, such as car mechanics, riding a motorcycle, and sports, whereas Leroy always falls short of Molly’s talents in these areas. When Carrie finds out that Molly has hit another girl from school, she threatens to educate Molly on how to be more feminine:

“she was going to keep me in the house to teach me to act right, cook, clean, and sew and that scared me” (Brown 33). Carrie highlights Molly’s supposed shortcomings in reference to femininity and the notion that there is something biologically (medically) wrong with her by stating: “no more going out with the roughhouse Hollow gang. That’s one of the things wrong with you that I can fix” (Brown 33). During the same exchange,

Carrie also points out that Leroy is skirting a potential deviation from the role a boy

“should” take. Leroy is dismayed that Carrie wants to keep his best friend indoors, so he volunteers to stay in with Molly. While Leroy’s offer comforts Molly, it enrages Carrie, who feels that she has enough to deal with with Molly’s divergence from her purported gender role: “‘You ain’t staying in here, Leroy Denman. You’re a boy and you go out and play like boys are supposed to.’ . . . Carrie tried to reason with Leroy but he wouldn’t budge until she started telling him what would happen to him if he picked up women’s ways. Now old Leroy was shaking. Everybody would point at him and laugh. Nobody would play with him” (33). It is the fear of being subject to social ostracization associated with homosexuality that convinces Leroy to conform to the expected role of a male child.

Carrie emphasizes the socially accepted male/female binary and its associated roles to pontificate on what Leroy and Molly are doing that is wrong for someone of their respective gender. Carrie falls back on the truths that medicine, law, and religion have 81 combined to teach her about sexuality and gender roles—all of which support heterosexuality and female subordinance to male dominance.

Molly encounters bigotry and/or misogyny with virtually every step she attempts to take towards her own self-fulfillment. Her mother tells her that she ought to be looking for a man to take care of her: “‘it don’t make sense for you to want women. No woman’s gonna take care of you. You go out there and marry some man and he’ll keep you. You’ll have money then. You’ll be sorry. There’s no security with a woman” (Brown 240). The implication here is that a woman either cannot or should not take care of herself financially; that it is not right for a woman to earn a living in the way a man would. The contrast between Molly and Leroy is again highlighted with his joking reference to the appropriate patriarchal roles: “Leroy added in his butchest voice, ‘Yeah, the women want to wear the pants nowadays so I tell my wife to go on out and support me, I’ll take care of the kids.’ Carrie laughed and Leroy’s wife snapped at his elbow, ‘Leroy, shut up’” (230).

Leroy suggests what societal forces have combined to have him believe—that a woman could never accomplish what a man could, in other words, that a woman is not strong enough or capable enough to financially support a family.

Molly challenges the medical notion of homosexuality as indicative of mental or physical illness by demonstrating her own strength, intelligence, and creative insightful ability as a film director in a hostile heterosexual and male dominated industry. She strives to change and better not only her own life, but the lives of other women and future generations of women. Molly serves as an example of a successful member of an oppressed minority group. She wants to prove that she can make it as a film director, even though she encounters great difficulties along the ways from her fellow students, 82 professors, and prospective employers who tell her that she should be an actress or secretary (acceptable jobs for women), and to leave the work of film directing for men.

Molly encounters such misogyny at school that she is forced to steal a camera and equipment from the school for a week in order to film her required final project for school, since her requests to borrow the equipment through the appropriate means are constantly turned down in favour of male students using the tools.

Molly argues against the popular medical discourse of homosexuality as a disease by prevailing over the hardships she faces as an out lesbian in a largely homophobic environment. She proves that she is not sick or depraved by earning scholarships to film school, graduating at the top of her class, and working to support herself while in school.

Molly paves the way for future strong, independent lesbian characters by taking care of herself financially and not settling for a relationship that does not fulfill her. She models the possibility of living productively as an out homosexual at a time when this was pragmatically very challenging. This perspective would have no doubt been refreshing for homosexual readers, who likely would have been bombarded with homophobic viewpoints in their day to day life. Brown deftly infuses into Molly’s story the realities of homophobia in America in the 1970s, and in this way paints a more realistic picture of homosexual existence for the reader. It is the fact that Molly prevails and thrives amidst such hostility that makes her story believable and something that readers could strive for.

If the novel had depicted an environment in which Molly was simply openly accepted despite sexual orientation, it would not have been believable or imitable. Instead, Molly’s strength and resilience speaks to the genuine struggles that homosexuals have faced in the

United States in the twentieth century. In effect, Brown is repackaging the American 83 ethos of individualism that initially functioned to negatively cast the theoretical disease of homosexuality as a weakness of will attributable at the level of the individual. In

Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown uses Molly’s determination and self-motivation to counter the judgement of weakness by psychoanalytic and sexological theories in the early part of the twentieth century so that Molly’s independence serves as proof of her strength, and as a plea for equality and queer civil rights.

When Leroy has a series of brief sexual encounters with an older male, Molly defends him and tells him to do whatever makes him happy. Leroy continually spouts the prevailing negative opinions of homosexuals from the 1970s and Molly rebuts them, stating, “keep doing it if it feels good. Hide it, that’s all. It’s nobody’s business what you’re doing anyway, Leroy” (Brown 66). He repeatedly quips, terrified that he might be identified as homosexual, “do you think I’m a queer?” and Molly replies with, “I think you are Leroy Denman, that’s what I think. I don’t give a flying fuck what you do, you’re still Leroy” (67). Basically, Molly argues that everyone is equal, regardless of their sexuality. Molly encounters similar homophobia and the fear of being identified as other and sick, when she and Carolyn have sex. They decide not to tell people about their sexual encounter, and Carolyn adds, “I hate to lie too, but people will say we’re lesbians”

(103). Carolyn goes on to excuse her love for Molly, yet express lesbian stereotypes: “we just love each other, that’s all. Lesbians look like men and are ugly. We’re not like that”

(104). As in the case of Leroy’s relation with Craig, even though Carolyn will sleep with

Molly, she is not willing to consider herself a lesbian because she associates lesbianism with an earlier sexologist discourse that postulated that true female inverts were outwardly masculine. 84

Brown manages to successfully expose the negative stereotypes associated with homosexuality by having characters express them while simultaneously demonstrating that not all lesbians conform to these stereotypes—Molly and Carolyn are neither sick nor depraved; they are simply two young girls in love. When they tell their friend Connie about their affair, and Connie expresses shock that they are queer, Carolyn shrieks, “we are not queer. How can you say that? I’m very feminine, how can you call me a queer?

Maybe Molly, after all she plays tennis and can throw a football as far as Clark, but not me” and “You know, lesbians are boyish and athletic. I mean Molly’s pretty and all that but she’s a better athlete than most of the boys that go to this school, and besides she doesn’t act like a girl, you know? I’m not like that at all. I just love Molly. That doesn’t make me queer” (106). Barnes uses Connie to challenge Carolyn’s bigoted way of thinking with the following statement: “Well, I’m about fifteen pounds overweight, hefty is what I believe it’s called, plus I don’t remember that I’ve ever cooed and giggled in true female fashion, so why don’t you come right out and call me a dyke too if that’s how your mind is misfunctioning” (106). Yet, when they are alone, Connie says, “Molly, I don’t know if I can be your friend anymore. I’ll think about it every time I see you. I’ll be nervous and wonder if you’re going to rape me or something” (108). Brown has Molly retort “That’s crazy. What do you think I do, run around panting at every female I see?

I’m not going to leap on you like a hyperthyroid ape” (108). In this way, Brown both exposes the prevailing mindset of many people—that homosexuals are undiscerning sex crazy maniacs—while also pointing to how unrealistic this line of thought is.

By displaying an open attitude toward polyamory that in no way lends to the stereotype of lesbians as sex-hungry predators, and by accepting and not making excuses 85 for the fact that she does not intend to marry and that she sees no problem with taking multiple lovers, Molly proves that alternate sexualities can be as valid as the dominant sexuality. Brown ends her novel with Molly thinking, “I wished I could walk down the streets and not hear those constant, abrasive sounds from the mouths of the opposite sex.

Damn, I wished the world would let me be myself. But I knew better on all counts. I wish I could make my films. That wish I can work for” (246). Rather than being an average citizen, Molly excels at everything she does. Brown effectively employs Molly to challenge not only misogynistic and homophobic beliefs, but to confront the heteropatriarchal dynamics at play with the idea of the kept woman. By refusing to be a kept woman, and insisting on paying her own way through film school, Molly validates not only lesbian independence, but female independence. She proves that a woman does not need to be kept by either a man or a woman in order to succeed in life.

CHAPTER THREE

CENSORSHIP – LITERATURE AND FILM

The stark censorship of homosexual content during specific periods of the twentieth century sent a clear message both to queer individuals and to heterosexuals. By censoring literature, film, television, and other art simply because of positive representation of alternate sexualities, or any representation at all, the governing body that enforced and implemented this standard or law was, in essence, stating that there was something wrong with it. David Ansen confirms the pervasiveness of the censorship of gay and lesbian content in films by stating that “according to Hollywood, homosexuality officially did not exist between the years 1934 and 1961. During those 27 years, the

Motion Picture Production Code saw to it that any depiction of ‘sex perversion’ was banished from the screen” (71). The fact that displays of heterosexual partnering, dating, or marriage have never been censored in the United States with the exception of graphic sexual representation highlights the disconnect when it comes to representation of other sexualities. This type of censorship links homosexuality with other censored content such as graphic violence, pornography, and depictions of criminal or illegal activity, which in turn will confirm with some readers or viewers that homosexuality is associated with other societally deemed undesirable content or activities. The same is true when we consider that many elementary and junior high schools in Canada and the United States today do not speak about homosexuality in the classroom setting, including classes on sexual health (Horn et al.72-73). This type of teaching hides homosexuality as though it were vulgar or undesirable. It marginalizes all sexualities other than heterosexuality, and 87 can cause the students in the class who either identify as queer, or who have parents or other family members who are queer to feel isolated, abnormal, or unhealthy.

Historically, gays and lesbians have been underrepresented in mainstream films, and when they were represented in film in the United States in the twentieth century, more often than not, the homosexual character either served as a comedic element, or was portrayed as criminal or insane. Suzanna Danuta Walters claims that this “exclusion from the central world of the cinema provided only more additional evidence of second-class status” (133). At the very least, the exclusion points to a less desirable or restricted expression of sexuality, one that the general viewing public was largely protected, or prevented, from seeing. Walters confirms that

more often than not, lesbians and gays have been depicted in coded terms,

their identity hidden from mainstream viewing and knowable only to the

astute (often gay) filmgoer. Otherwise, gays entered the silver screen as

tortured, self-loathing creatures of an exotic and dangerous subculture.

From prison matrons out to seduce the unjustly incarcerated innocents to

limp-wristed dandies plotting government overthrows and familial unrest,

the depiction of gays and lesbians was characterized by a plethora of

outlandish stereotypes. (131)

The ban on gay and lesbian content in mainstream film production in the mid-twentieth century was far reaching, and no doubt influenced the subsequent rules that literary publishing houses faced. Similar to the moral code imposed by the motion picture association, in the 1950s fiction authors were penalized, usually by having their books taken out of print or losing postal distribution, if they attempted to depict homosexuality 88 in an exclusively positive light, without warning of the social penalties, or calling attention to the presumed immorality and sickness that the medical disease model associated with expressions of homosexuality. Elliott writes that

the necessity for “bad” endings (capitulations to obligatory

heterosexuality, . . . isolation, disgrace, alcoholism, and death) in modern

lesbian fiction was dictated, in part, by prevailing obscenity laws that

prohibited circulation of these novels through the public mails to

distributors unless the books concluded prescriptively with punishment of

the transgressive desires and identities of lesbian characters. (93)

In this way, governmental departments could monitor and censor print materials to ensure that they were upholding the values and moral beliefs of the general public. Regardless of the reason for presenting homosexuality as sinful and depraved, lesbians who reached for this literature with the hope of seeing themselves reflected and validated were also invariably preached to about their supposed depravity and indoctrinated with a viewpoint that promoted internalized homophobia and self-hatred. Therefore, while pulp fiction novels such as Vin Packer’s Spring Fire do tend to reaffirm dominant, hegemonic views, they also offered at least some visibility to a community that was virtually shunned.

During the years of the Motion Picture Production Code in the United States, director Alfred Hitchcock produced a startling number of films with homosexual protagonists. While Hitchcock’s queer characters occupy a more central role than they would in most films of the era, their portrayal along the accepted spectrum purported by medical ideology arguably does not subvert any of the negative taxonomies. In examining the function of stereotypically portrayed secondary homosexual characters, Patricia 89

White asks the question: “What is it that supporting characters are meant to ‘support’ if not the imbricated ideologies of heterosexual romance and white American hegemony permeating Hollywood cinema? They prop up a very particular representational order”

(464). While many of Hitchcock’s homosexual characters are primary characters, they clearly function to support heteropatriarchal ideologies. Repeatedly cast in the negative light of sickness, mental illness, and predatory tendencies, the characters in these films support medical doctrine of the mid-twentieth century.

When one examines classic films by director Alfred Hitchcock that feature homosexual protagonists, such as Rebecca (1940), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train

(1951), and arguably Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Psycho (1960), one quickly draws the connection between homosexuality and insanity and/or criminality. While often given high profile roles, the homosexual characters in Hitchcock’s films are consistently the villains. This link not only reflects some of the medical professional theories and popular opinions of the mid-twentieth century, but it also perpetuates the negative stereotypes about queer individuals. As in other films of the time, the homosexual characters depicted in films by Hitchcock are criminal, mentally ill, or perverse in some obvious manner. The one predominant feature of the queer characters in Hitchcock’s films is that they often feature as protagonists rather than simply incidental characters.

A common tie among many, if not all, of Hitchcock’s gay protagonists is that they are murderous, conscienceless sociopaths. Viewed through the lens of Foucault’s interpretations of the significance of a history of sexuality that is necessarily constructed and influenced by social policing and community organizations, film interpretations of homosexuals is vital to an understanding of the ways in which character stereotypes are 90 perpetually reinforced. Writing about the social control that could be gained through monitoring sexuality, Foucault states that

medicine made a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created

an entire organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of

“incomplete” sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of related

pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of “development” and

instinctual “disturbances”; and it undertook to manage them. (The History

of Sexuality 41)

By producing films that re-enforce the dominant medical and psychological interpretations of homosexuals in the mid-twentieth century, Hitchcock contributed to the common belief that the taxonomies of abnormal traits attributed to homosexuals were factual. Further, the characterization of the gentle sociopathic homosexual, as seen in many of Hitchcock’s films, supported fears of homosexual danger and moral panic propaganda.

In Strangers on a Train, Bruno is presented as a homosexual and mentally unstable murderer. He is a needy, dependent adult who lives in a mansion with the parents he despises. Bruno initially approaches tennis star Guy Hanes (played by Farley

Granger) on a train as an overzealous fan who knows a little too much about Guy’s personal life and relationship. Bruno’s high-pitched voice, excitability, and consistent lurking in dark corners lend both a frightening and comedic edge to his portrayal of an extremely dangerous homosexual whom the tennis star does not seem to be able to rid himself of. Bruno not only becomes exceedingly dangerous as the film progresses, but he also brings Guy into his murderous plot. In this way, Bruno moreover promotes the fear 91 that homosexuals are duplicitous and dangerous and capable of negatively influencing others.

In Psycho, Norman Bates is an effeminate young man who lives alone with his mother and dresses in her clothing. Norman is a shy, socially awkward cross-dressing murderer, who in the final scene of the film is portrayed as suffering from a psychotic break in which he believes he is his mother. In Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charlie marries a string of wealthy elderly widows, murders them, and steals their fortunes. Throughout the film, Charlie expresses how loathsome he finds it to be affectionate with the widows, and he seems to take great pleasure and thrill from strangling them. While the protagonists in both of these films, Norman and Charlie, are not ever expressly outed as homosexual, they consistently display stereotypically homosexual characteristics—such as effeminacy and excessive cleanliness—that cue the audience to their “unusual” personalities. The fact that Norman’s hobby is taxidermy also points to his morbidity and eccentricity. Additionally, both men display an overt distaste toward female sexuality— rather than becoming aroused (as a heterosexual male character may) upon seeing Marion naked in the shower, Norman goes “psycho” and stabs her to death, while Charlie’s absolute disgust for women enables him to unconscionably steal from and murder rich women.

In Rebecca, as in the classic novel by Daphne du Maurier that Hitchcock adapted for his film, Mrs. Danvers is clearly unhealthily obsessed with and in love with Rebecca

(or with the ideal of preserving the memory of the deceased Rebecca). Mrs. Danvers, who remains in the role of Rebecca’s maid even after Rebecca has died, is conspicuous to queer viewers as a stereotypical lesbian because of her working status and solitary 92 nature—she stands out by not standing out. White comments on character types who are often deciphered as lesbians: “nurses, secretaries, career women, nuns, companions, and housekeepers connote, not lesbian identity, but a deviation from heterosexualized femininity” (465). Women in working-class positions such as housekeepers, companions, and teachers in the late 1800s and early 1900s were often read as lesbian since these positions sometimes afforded them the ability to live—albeit modestly—without the support of a man. White points out the further problematization of this type of lesbian representation by stating that “it is no accident that the social types standing in for lesbians in Hollywood cinema are misogynistically coded as ‘asexual.’ They are trivialized and rendered comical rather than threatening. . . . [This] compounds the invisibility to which lesbians are already consigned” (466). Hence, Hitchcock and du

Maurier’s portrayal of the obsessive Mrs. Danvers perpetuates psychiatric diagnoses that classify lesbians and gay men as mentally unstable.

In Rope, Hitchcock inventively used minimal camera cuts so that the entire film takes place in a small apartment, giving the movie the feel of a seamless theatrical play. It is a suspenseful drama that takes place in a confined space, and this lends to, and highlights, the anxiety of the gay male protagonists, Brandon and Philip. Vincent Canby describes Rope, stating that the screenplay, “adapted from Patrick Hamilton's play, is full of the kind of self-conscious epigrams and breezy ripostes that once defined wit and decadence in the Broadway theater” (N. pag.). No doubt, as a thriller, the film is intended to be serious and tense drama, yet Canby compares Rope to a “drawing-room comedy.”

The fact that the film, despite its subject matter, is comedic at points additionally speaks to the use of the homosexual protagonists as stereotypically comedic representations of 93 gay men. Certainly, Philip’s quick intoxication and girlish squeals as he becomes increasingly anxious over the course of the film along with Brandon’s brazen limp- wristed fastidiousness highlight an image of the gay male as entertaining spectacle. Add to this stereotypical portrayal the clear lack of conscience, particularly by Brandon, and the homosexual protagonists become extremely threatening.

It is certainly unusual that Hitchcock managed to produce the number of films he did with homosexual lead characters while the Hay’s Code was in effect in the United

States. Canby states that “it’s another measure of Hitchcock's wiles that, though the film was made back in the days when any suggestion of homosexuality was supposedly taboo,

‘Rope’ is immediately explicit without actually committing any offenses the Production

Code people could object to” (N. pag.). Arguably, similar to lesbian and gay pulp fiction novels that were produced in the 1950s, Hitchcock may have been successful in the production of these films firstly because the homosexual characters, while displaying stereotypically gay traits such as effeminacy and fastidiousness, did not explicitly draw attention to their sexual orientation. So the average person watching the films could presumably either not notice that the character was gay, or could easily ignore his/her sexuality. Secondly, by having the characters appear as criminally insane and/or murderous, as in the pulp fiction novels, Hitchcock could bypass the censors since he was not presenting homosexuality in a positive light. Roger Ebert describes Rope as the

movie version of a play that was inspired by the Leopold-Loeb murder

case. In the play, two homosexual college students become fascinated by

their philosophy professor’s ideas about the “innate superiority” of some

people over others. Convinced they have found a victim who is inferior to 94

them, they murder him, conceal his body in an unlocked trunk in their

apartment, and then throw a dinner party with the trunk as the brazen

centerpiece of the living room. (N. pag.)

While the characters of Brandon and Philip do appear attractive, financially well off, educated, and well liked, it is they—the only two homosexuals in the film—who murder their heterosexual friend. So Hitchcock’s presentation of gay males reconfirms the detrimental, yet common, social view of homosexuals as capable of monstrous acts regardless of how gentle, refined, or unassuming they may appear on the exterior; hence

Hitchcock depicts homosexuals as a threat to “decent” society.

Alfred Hitchcock’s films differ from the novels by Barnes, Packer, and Brown in that they do not appropriate the medical pathological view of homosexuality and use it to argue against it. Instead, Hitchcock’s films reinforce bigoted, anti-homosexual notions of heterosexual moral superiority that can be linked to twentieth-century pathology theories that suggested there was a link between homosexuality and criminal deviance, moral inferiority, immaturity, and mental instability. The queer characters in Hitchcock’s films are dangerous not only to themselves, but also to the “good” law-abiding heterosexuals.

As Walters rightly states, “visibility is, of course, necessary for equality. It is part of the trajectory of any movement for inclusion and social change. We come to know ourselves and to be known by others through the images and stories of popular culture” (13).

However, when this visibility is exclusively negative, one must question the potential harmful consequences of such a portrayal for the homosexual community.

CHAPTER FOUR

CONCLUSIONS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE AND FILM, DSM CHANGES, AND TRANSEXUALITY

Visibility of lesbians, gay men, and transgender characters in literature, film, and television has increased in the twenty-first century; however, it is debatable whether the quality of these characters has improved. The question is, are the queer characters in mainstream films still primarily presented as mentally unwell, criminal, or as tools for comic relief? Walters claims that for the most part, homosexuals are still presented as incidental or secondary “others” and that they are “hardly the fully developed, fully sexual, fully human characters that gays have been clamoring for for years” (135). This presentation of the incidental homosexual can be seen as a positive step in that these characters are often cookie-cutter stereotypes of a happy sexless gay character as opposed to a murderous one, but the question of why it is so common for these gay characters to be rather undeveloped and asexual compared to their heterosexual counterparts remains.

Walters adds that “it would be naive to believe that both overt and—more generally— covert censorship doesn’t still exist. There is no longer a production code that specifically rules certain images out of existence. However, Hollywood’s seeming embrace of gay themes is both cautious and limited” (Walters 136). Evidence of this cautious approach to homosexuality from Hollywood is the desexualized gay best friend character who simply serves as the no-nonsense, fashion-conscious friend who helps the heroine secure a heterosexual lover, as in Clueless, As Good as It Gets, and Must Love Dogs.

While most mainstream Hollywood films are slow to catch up to a more equal and realistic portrayal of homosexuality, the clear exception to this is television and 96 independent film. It is becoming more common for television networks with more leniency as to ratings and a more daring approach to questionably explicit content such as sex and violence, for example HBO, to produce television series with overt homosexual content such as The L Word and Queer as Folk. The fact that there have been a few mainstream Hollywood films to portray realistic queer characters, such as B D ’

Cry, and Brokeback Mountain is a positive sign that culture in the United States may be nearing a point when homosexual film portrayals are no longer relegated to stereotypes of the gay best friend or the sociopathic outcast. It may be that the asexual gay best friend figure is mainly only currently prominent in mainstream American films that support a multitude of questionably limited heteronormative narratives.

Because connections are drawn between medical assertions (such as insanity), legal repercussions (such as criminality), and moral judgements about homosexuality that tie in with religious beliefs and laws of nature, it has been unusually difficult for homosexuals to move beyond the extreme oppression they have faced. Medical and psychiatric authority has become recognized as holding the key to ultimate scientific truths, and because of this, the initial negative diagnoses of sickness, immaturity, and criminality of homosexuals has been ingrained in cultural representations of alternate sexualities in the United States. Nussbaum argues that “the resistance to full equality for gays has deep psychological roots. Fear of the erosion of traditional distinctions and boundaries, fear of a type of female sexuality that is unavailable to men, fear of a type of male sexuality that is receptive rather than assertive—all these probably play a role in making the current debate as ugly and irrational as it is” (185). There has been great progress toward equality and acceptance for homosexuals in the early part of the twenty- 97 first century, but there are still many changes that need to be addressed. Indeed, we are still at a pivotal moment in queer American history. Walter points out that “never have we had so many openly gay elected officials, or so many anti-gay initiatives” (13).

Ultimately, the United States has a history of categorizing people hierarchically according to gender and sexuality, and any progress toward equality must address this.

Rubin states that

individuals whose behavior stands high in this hierarchy are rewarded with

certified mental health, respectability, legality, social and physical

mobility, institutional support, and material benefits. As sexual behaviors

or occupations fall lower on the scale, the individuals who practice them

are subjected to a presumption of mental illness, disreputability,

criminality, restricted social and physical mobility, loss of institutional

support, and economic sanctions. (316)

When taken as a whole, the overreaching power of the medical and psychiatric communities has proven to be startling. The punishments for social and sexual nonconformity in the United States can be drastic and reach all aspects of an individual’s life. It becomes evident why the cautions set out by Michel Foucault regarding the state, discipline, and policing must be thoroughly examined.

The lives of homosexuals continue to be affected by the legacy of classifications of sexuality that began in Europe in the late 1800s. Rubin writes that “periods such as the

1880s in England, and the 1950s in the United States, recodify the relations of sexuality.

The struggles that were fought leave a residue in the form of laws, social practices, and ideologies which then affect the way in which sexuality is experienced long after the 98 immediate conflicts have faded” (312). Toward the late twentieth century, when there appeared to be a lessening of public reprimands against homosexuality, the AIDS crisis came about and proved the remaining strength of the negative medical and psychiatric links between homosexuality and disease. Treichler implores that

Our social constructions of AIDS (in terms of global devastation, threat to

civil rights, emblem of sex and death, the “gay plague,” the postmodern

condition, whatever) are based not upon objective, scientifically

determined “reality” but upon what we are told about this reality: that is,

upon prior social constructions routinely produced within the discourses

of biomedical science. (AIDS as infectious disease is one such

construction). There is a continuum, then, not a dichotomy, between

popular and biomedical discourses. (104-105)

The negative vestiges of AIDS being initially labeled GRID still haunt the gay community. The medical diagnosis of GRID was a moral value judgment on the homosexual community. Treichler further adds that “another appeal of thinking of AIDS as a ‘gay disease’ is that it protects not only the sexual practices of heterosexuality but also its ideological superiority. In the service of this hypothesis, both homophobia and sexism are folded imperturbably into the language of the scientific text” (115). If AIDS were a gay disease, it would after all protect the dominance of heterosexuality as the right or medically deemed normal sexuality.

Medicine and psychology represent authoritative rule over the normal and the abnormal in human personality and behaviour. Rubin states that over the twentieth century, “medicine and psychiatry multiplied the categories of sexual misconduct. The 99 section on psychosexual disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is a fairly reliable map of the current moral hierarchy of sexual activities” (316). Hence medical documents and literature can be valuable tools to understand historical social structures and moral beliefs. When we are seeking the history of a community whose early records are rather ill-documented, literature, particularly popular literature, can be an excellent resource that, while not a true historical account, often does depict fictional accounts of “current” times in such a way that the author hopes will be believable to readers and will represent common experiences of homosexual people. Certainly, we cannot interpret literature to be an accurate account of history, yet as G. S. Rousseau states, “literary evidence is considered a significant resource for social history” (411). It makes sense to combine literature and medicine to garner a more complete picture of an underrepresented and oppressed community. One can anticipate the significance of a similar examination of the intersection between popular literature and medicine in relation to transsexual studies and history. Stryker confirms that “several transgender-themed mass market paperback books were published in the 1950s” (Transgender History 52), which leads to the question of whether these books and similar publications follow a path of transsexual demonization akin to the moral panic surrounding homosexuality at pivotal moments in the twentieth century.

Today, transsexual and transgender identified individuals face an arguably different relationship to the medical community than homosexuals do. The first indication that psychiatric authorities may work toward bettering the lives of homosexuals was when “the APA Board of Trustees voted on 15 December 1973 to delete homosexuality 100 from the DSM” (Rosario 248). Progress has happened for transgendered individuals in relation to the DSM as recently as May 2013, but declassification has been slower for trans-identified people than for homosexuals. When looking at evolving DSM listings for transgenderism, there is no doubt a movement away from medicalization toward understanding with more compassionate categorization such as “gender identity disorder,” and more recently, “gender dysphoria.” With the newer classifications of transgendered individuals there is an attempt to provide “curative” measures only if that is what individuals want—hence transsexual, or gender dysphoric, individuals are the ones who dictate if they are unhappy or uncomfortable with their gender in relation to their biological sex, and medical classification allows space for individuals who identify as non-surgically transsexual. It is certainly progress that the psychiatric community is not searching to “cure” all transsexuals. However, the fact that many transsexuals do seek surgery measures ensures that transgenderism will doubtlessly continue to have a relationship with the medical community. There is current debate as to whether transsexuality should be listed in DSM at all, since the taxonomy carries with it a great deal of stigma. Further research as to the connection between medicine, psychology, and transgender studies would be valuable.

101

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