Bill Tildens Performances of the Unruly Male Body
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Taking Punishment Gladly; Bill Tildens Performances of the Unruly Male Body N a t h a n T i t m a n * American Studies University o f Iowa Although historians have read the athleticism o f seven-time national tennis cham pion Bill Tilden as a cover for his sexual identity, his playing style was very much a product o f his existence outside normative gender expectations in the 1920s. Tennis allowed Tilden to engage in the homosocial amateur sporting code o f upper-class Northeastemers— establishing psychological intimacy with playing partners, opponents, andprotégés— while also adapting the more “roughneck” and varied techniques o f working-class Californian players into a style that observers celebrated for both its power and its beauty Tilden defied contempo rary expectations that bourgeois white men should eventually limit their partici pation in leisure and settle down with marriage and stable capitalist produc tion, while using athletic movement to bridge gentler categories in the creation o f his own “artistic” self-expression. I n t h e 1920s, Bill Tilden became tennis’ version of a sport celebrity. He won seven national titles in that decade and, in 1920, became the first American man to win fA version of this paper was selected as the 2014 winner of the North American Society for Sport History Graduate Student Essay. Correspondence to [email protected]. Wimbledon. Sports enthusiasts who enjoyed more leisure time and expendable income after World War I craved appealing champion athletes, and Tilden joined the ranks of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Red Grange as one of the leading protagonists in the “Golden Age of Sport.”1 However, despite his dominant play and— compared to previous tennis champions— unrivaled celebrity, his arrests in 1946 and 1949 for morals violations with underage boys ultimately rendered him a pariah in the sport, a tragic figure whose sexual proclivities sullied his athletic successes. A recent New York Times article addressed Tilden’s near eradication from public memory, pointing out that the governing authorities of tennis have “not immortalized Tilden with a trophy, a stadium court or a statue” in spite of having once dominated the sport.2 Other assessments of Tilden’s career suggest that the media and Tilden himself attempted to obscure his sexuality through a shaming silence. Sports media historian John Carvalho and communication scholar Mike Milford found that the press barely covered his arrests at all and that Tilden’s attempt to portray himself as a victim of both circumstance and a medical “condition” in a 1948 autobiography was “limited and ineffective,” garnering little attention.3 His biographer Frank Deford con cluded that “the crowd and the game were [Tildens] sex,” suggesting that tennis effectively substituted for Tilden’s repressed homosexual identity.4 I argue that tennis, rather than sublimating Tilden’s closeted sexuality, offered him the opportunity to express a gender and sexual identity that constituted an alternative to con temporary expectations regarding male bodies and movement. If Tilden never identified as “gay,” he still attained a non-heteronormative identity in athletic performance. At a time when white men felt increasing pressure to perform masculinity and heterosexuality through efficient and productive movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, Tilden displayed male athleticism with a difference, destabilizing the gender and sexual categories to which many of his admirers subscribed and suggesting new potentials for the performance of white masculinity. The sport of tennis offered Tilden two unique opportunities: a stage for his “artistic” movement and the chance to affiliate himself with a code of gender socialization that responded to his particular sexual urges. O n the level o f movement and physicality, he wished to maintain the aesthetic value of male tennis athleticism— one that allowed spec tators to witness the supposed refinement and control of white male bodies— but did so in ways that responded to a 1920s sport culture that favored a more kinetic, aggressive mas culinity. He effectively merged the privileging of leisurely, mechanical posing— embodied by upper-class players in earlier generations— and the roughneck scrambling of working- class West Coast players who came to prominence in the 1910s. Often drawing compari sons to dance, Tilden’s tennis movement emanated both “masculine” aggression and “femi nine” excess for his audiences. In terms of gender socialization, tennis’ privileging of gentlemanly amateurism— as defined by contemporary Anglo-American mores— and civilized homosocial competition placed Tilden in close proximity to the youthful masculine innocence that preoccupied him throughout his life. For a man whose sheltered childhood taught him to think of bodies as potential sources of disease and filth, but who also fetishized boyhood inno cence, the pristine sheen of tennis sportsmanship offered him a socially-sanctioned arena in which he could attain a measure of intimacy with young men. Throughout his amateur career, his disdain for contact with the human body rendered him virtually asexual— he avoided intimate physical contact with both men and women until regularly taking young male lovers after the mid 1930s. Even his later same-sex encounters were, in Deford’s terms, “immature” in nature— he would usually “fondle the... partner, and then mastur bate himself afterwards, in private.”5 Tennis, with its hints of intense psychological aware ness between competitors, offered Tilden the opportunity to attain intimate knowledge of other male athletes, without the threat of “impure” physical contact. There is little debate about Tilden’s accomplishments in helping to push tennis fur ther outside the gates of the country clubs that once insulated the sport from threats to blue-blooded class, gender, and racial norms. Yet Tilden based his ideal image for men’s tennis, in part, on his unmentionable desires, emphasizing unsophisticated youth, homosocial camaraderie, and unfettered movement. While other writers have portrayed Tilden as a paragon of early twentieth-century Anglo-American ideals, I contend that Tilden capitalized on a savvy understanding of the social upheavals of tennis in order to fashion new physical potentials for male tennis players that were not based entirely on efficiency and productivity.6 I am careful to avoid claiming Tilden as “gay” or “homo sexual” (he certainly never identified as such in his life), but I emphasize his desires in order to illuminate the ways in which sexual diversity can potentially shape forms of popu lar culture and to underscore sexuality as a point o f view , an aspect of identity that moves beyond private intimacies to influence public conduct and interactions. I keep in mind the shifting class, racial, and gendered meanings of tennis but suggest that sexual desires can also contribute to an individual’s relationship to sport and fellow athletes. My reading of Tilden’s amateur career presumes that a man with his desires would have responded to sport culture, athleticism, and male bodies differently than many other prominent tennis players. For instance, while some men might accept journalistic comparisons between their athletic performances and “artistic” dance as simple compliments, Tilden could em brace such analogies for associating him with movements that, in the context of the 1920s, blurred rigid masculine/feminine distinctions.7 In this article, I provide an overview of tennis’ amateur sporting code in the early twentieth century, characterized by racial and class exclusion, and the belief that sport offered different benefits to bourgeois and working-class competitors. I then turn to an analysis of Tilden’s career as an amateur, during which his desire for generic innocent boyhood influenced his on-court performances and his relationships with competitors, doubles partners, and protégés. I also explore Tilden’s journalistic and autobiographical writing for his commentary on tennis strategy and male bodies. These sources suggest that, for Tilden, intimacy remained psychological rather than physical. I then provide an overview of male tennis physicality prior to Tilden’s emergence as a celebrity athlete. I incorporate descriptions of Tilden’s tennis performances and their combinations of kinetic “masculine” athleticism and “feminine” dance. I also analyze his self-identification as an “artist”—a term that frustrated onlookers often used to explain his theatrical difference from his male opponents. I acknowledge the limitations of depending on Tilden’s journalistic and autobiographi cal writings in attempting to elucidate his opinions about tennis and its meanings for male sexuality and athleticism. As a man who pursued the advantages of celebrity and public favor through much of his adult life, he had much to risk in providing explicit clues about possessing taboo desires. Accordingly, he was never appreciably open about the intimate details of his life, and the historical record will never offer certainty about his sexual prac tices or the precise motivations for his athletic career. Because of the absence of sources documenting Tilden’s actual sexual desires and experiences, my argument— like those of many other researchers describing the histories of sexual minorities— remains circumstan tial, the result of interpreting various signs and reading them against the prevailing ideolo gies and material realities in the 1920s.8 I analyze Tilden’s