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Abstract Gay Men's Literature in the United States ABSTRACT GAY MEN’S LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES (1903 – 1968): UNCOVERING THE BURIED ROOTS OF A QUEER TRADITION Adam W. Burgess, PhD Department of English Northern Illinois University, 2017 Ibis Gómez-Vega, Director This dissertation draws on queer-postmodernism and feminist standpoint theory to investigate and describe aspects of the gay American literary tradition before the historic Stonewall Riots. Specifically, the dissertation offers four points of enquiry: the significance of a text’s displacement in time and location; the successful pulp fiction genre; the importance of intertextuality in establishing discourse; and the complexities of gender and sexuality in fictional texts that incorporate and describe same-sex relationships. There are many works that examine gay American writing in the twentieth-century but much of this scholarship pertains to literature of the 1950s and later; criticism of gay texts published before Stonewall is severely limited. The output of texts by gay American writers begins before the twentieth-century but grows rapidly in scale and clarity of purpose after Whitman, beginning especially with Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1903). As a literary historiography, this dissertation treats questions of culture and society alongside close readings of representative texts to argue that the gay literary tradition in the United States is intricately linked to institutions such as medicine, psychology, publication methods, and the law. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DE KALB, ILLINOIS MAY 2017 GAY MEN’S LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES (1903 – 1968): UNCOVERING THE BURIED ROOTS OF A QUEER TRADITION BY ADAM WAYNE BURGESS © 2017 Adam W. Burgess A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Doctoral Director: Ibis Gómez-Vega ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many individuals have contributed their time, resources, and expertise to various areas of this project. I would first like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. Ibis Gómez-Vega, from whom I have learned so much, and who has helped me shape and focus every aspect of this project. By sharing with me her exceptional knowledge of queer and minority American literature, I have gained a unique understanding of this period that will continue to inform my future research. Next, I am indebted to Dr. Scott Balcerzak, who helped me begin the process of engaging with complicated theoretical arguments in queer, feminist, and masculinity studies, and whose guidance and encouragement were important in my decision to embrace this project. I am grateful to Dr. Bradley Peters, who offered invaluable feedback in the early stages of this project and who made helpful suggestions for obscure readings and necessary resources. As a mentor, he not only guided my learning but also helped me to become a more confident instructor. I would also like to thank Dr. Nancy Wingfield, expert in the history of gender and sexuality, who became an inspiration as well as an invaluable resource as I completed a graduate certificate in LGBT Studies. These professors introduced me to a wealth of applicable information both inside and outside of my research area that helped to broaden my perspectives and ultimately produce a stronger and more thorough investigation. Finally, thank you to Dr. Michael Day and Ellen Franklin, who were instrumental in my growth and development as a teacher, scholar, and professional. DEDICATION For Jesse “Love is the right to say: I do and I do and I do...” –Richard Blanco TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 THE GENESIS OF A GAY AMERICAN TRADITION .................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 CONVENIENT (DIS)PLACEMENT: THE IMPORTANCE OF TIME AND PLACE .......................... 18 CHAPTER 3 THE POWER OF PULP FICTION: CONSTRUCTING & PERPETUATING STEREOTYPES ............. 55 CHAPTER 4 INTERTEXTUALITY: THE SELF, THE OTHER, AND CODED COMMUNITY ............................. 102 CHAPTER 5 RESISTANCE AND ACQUIESCENCE: PROBLEMS OF GENDER & SEXUALITY........................ 153 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................... 211 CHAPTER 1 THE GENESIS OF A GAY AMERICAN TRADITION “In the bright light of day their eyes burned with a tenderness against each other, as if to say: now it is done; we have reached the just-beyond; there is no going back to something less; there is no ending. But they knew the time had been too much, that all the time to come would be too much, not for themselves, but for others—for the living and the dead.” –Thomas Hal Phillips, The Bitterweed Path, p. 312. In The History of Sexuality (1976), Michel Foucault argues that the contemporary understanding of homosexuality as a distinctive identity rooted in a “quality of sexual sensibility” was first articulated just before the turn of the twentieth-century (43). Indeed, nineteenth-century developments in “psychology, jurisprudence, and literature” motivated not only social and political “controls” of nontraditional sexualities, but also for the creation of a discourse environment wherein “homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged” (101). The nineteenth-century, then, created the language and definitions that twentieth-century writers would begin to use in order to self- identify, to question, to expand upon, and to redefine sexual identity. This engagement with the new homosexual “species” would create, in literature, a unique and diverse field. If this new understanding of homosexuality has its genesis in the nineteenth-century, then why does the majority of criticism pertaining to gay American literature ignore the first half of the twentieth- 2 century1? In the following dissertation, I examine the relatively omitted history of gay American literature from 1903 to 19682. In their introduction to Pages Passed from Hand to Hand (1997), Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt imagine a nineteenth century homosexual customer urgently searching a bookstore’s shelves for stories about love involving same-sex partners. Despite the probable difficulties for readers hoping to find these books on public display, the editors claim that “the surprise . is that the books were there all along, if only you had known where to look” (xvii). A similar “surprise” occurs in gay American literature. The overwhelming evidence in criticism pertaining to gay literature would lead readers to believe that the only major works to come out of this tradition began appearing as late as the 1940s, with Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. In fact, there were a number of writers shaping and contributing to the tradition as early as 19033. Gay literature, according to Gregory Woods, “offers . a broad range of interest, both in terms of identifiably shared emotions and as a documentary glimpse of ‘our’ sexual history” (2). 1 Even groundbreaking works of queer theory and literary studies, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Mark Lilly’s Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century (1993) focus primarily on European writers, “major writers” (e.g. Henry James, Oscar Wilde) and the potentially gay masters (e.g. Herman Melville). In these texts and in similar scholarship, there also tends to be a wide gap between the works of Wilde and Christopher Isherwood, for example. 2 A notable exception is James Levin’s The Gay Novel in America (1991) which includes a chapter on early twentieth-century gay American pulp fiction as well as sections devoted to gay writing in the 1950s and 1960s, but even this work ignores the period between 1900 and 1920 and merely glosses the 1920s and 1930s, with Forman Brown’s Better Angel being the only non- pulp piece mentioned. 3 Robert Drake’s The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read (Anchor 1998) does an admirable job of presenting a chronological history of gay literature (broadly defined), beginning with 1 Samuel and ending with contemporary texts; however, inclusion of American writers is minimal and often not explicitly homosexual (e.g. Henry David Thoreau and Anne Rice). 3 Accepting this argument, it is then incumbent upon scholars to acknowledge and examine the full range of that history, particularly those periods, such as the early-twentieth century, which have been neglected but which can and will greatly inform scholarship in the field. As Mark Lilly argues, “in comparison with the established success, especially in the United States, of studies based on women and race, gay studies are in their infancy” (xii). This makes inquiry into gay literature a pressing concern, and examination of those overlooked but foundational texts, such as Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1903), Edward I. Prime-Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum (1906), Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) and Forman Brown’s Better Angel (1933) all the more urgent. In addition to identifying influential texts, I will employ methods of historiography and literary studies to distinguish features of early gay literature in America in a way that demonstrates consistency and shared concerns throughout, thus helping to create and define a distinct literary community or tradition. Gay American literature, as a field of study distinct from
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