Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Winter 12-15-2016 Pleasure in the Past: Queer Nostalgia in the Gay American Century Elisabeth Windle Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Recommended Citation Windle, Elisabeth, "Pleasure in the Past: Queer Nostalgia in the Gay American Century" (2016). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1013. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1013 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English and American Literature Dissertation Examination Committee: Anca Parvulescu, Chair William J. Maxwell Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. Melanie Micir Amber Jamilla Musser Vivian Pollak Pleasure in the Past: Queer Nostalgia in the Gay American Century by Elisabeth Windle A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2016 St. Louis, Missouri © 2016, Elisabeth Windle Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 “Cocksucking and Democracy” in the Shadow of the Capitol: Walt Whitman and the Neoliberal Literary Imagination 36 Chapter 2 “It never really was the same”: Brother to Brother’s Black and White and Queer Nostalgia 75 Chapter 3 Truman Capote’s Swans: Effeminacy, Friendship, and Style in Douglas McGrath’s Infamous 117 Chapter 4 In the Past, Across the Ocean: Nostalgic American Dreams of 1930s Berlin 155 Coda Nostalgia, A Queer Mode of Grief 188 Works Cited 204 Acknowledgments I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people, and I consider it a happy task to finally have the space and time to thank them properly. First among these, of course, is my advisor Anca Parvulescu. Her charm, kindness, wit, and intellect are unparalleled, and I am a better scholar because I have been able to study with her. She has taught me about pedagogy—about how much of good teaching is listening closely and listening well—and about scholarly style, both written and embodied. During the years I worked on this project, Anca’s incisive questions about gender, modernism, cultural studies, critical theory, and a host of other things guided me to deeper and more complex thinking. She is exceptional at what she does, and she has been an exceptional advisor, colleague, and friend to me. I am fortunate to have had Bill Maxwell’s guidance from the beginning. It was in a class with him that I discovered Richard Bruce Nugent, and this project was born. Bill’s influence is all across this dissertation, and the dissertation is better for it. Vivian Pollak reignited my interest in Whitman, and encouraged the admittedly wacky questions I was asking about him and around him. Both personally and professionally, she has been enormously supportive of me over the past seven years, provided a model for agile and capacious thinking, and, perhaps most importantly, never failed to make me laugh. Melanie Micir offered exceptionally good advice at every stage of this project. I appreciate her attention to an embarrassingly early draft of chapter four, even while she was on leave. Conversations with Jeffrey McCune—and reading his field-defining work—have left chapter two in much better shape than it began. A class I audited with Amber Musser when I was deep into this dissertation reminded me why queer theory is important, and iii why it’s important to me. Amber and Jeffrey—and, indeed, all the faculty and graduate students in my other institutional home, Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Studies—reassure me that interdisciplinarity need not be a meaningless buzzword, but can be embraced with rigor and purpose. For me, earning a PhD has never been a solitary pursuit. I have been fortunate to work alongside exceptional colleagues, talking things through, sharing ideas, and sometimes disagreeing, almost always productively. Claire Class, Meg Dobbins, and Kelly Oman started graduate school with me and, through coursework, summer French class, teaching composition, major fields, and everything else, it was my great good fortune to embark on this journey with them. Two others, Susanna Williams and Ben Meiners, arrived later, but were just as integral to shaping my thinking, keeping me going, and cheering me on. I also want to extend my thanks to the two administrative assistants who served during my time in graduate school, Kathy Schneider and Sarah Hennessey. Both were amazingly supportive, always ready to answer any question, and have been, each in her own way, the heart of the English graduate program. Three fellowships at Washington University allowed me time and funding to complete this project in a more or less timely fashion. I extend my deep appreciation to the Graduate School, the Center for the Humanities, and the University Libraries and Writing Center for their financial and intellectual support over the past two years. This project began, in whatever nascent way, with teachers. Eric Bailey was my teacher, friend, mentor, and fill-in mom. He never stopped pushing me to do more and be better, and his influence is strong in my life, even now. This dissertation exists because of him, but also because Carolyn Matteson taught me the skill of close reading, Julie Seeley taught me about literary iv periodization, and Robin Silbergleid taught me that the best analytical work is always also creative. My family, though they haven’t always understood precisely what I was up to in the past seven years, have nonetheless believed in me implicitly. I am indebted to my grandparents (my second parents, really) for their emotional and financial support. Anything I write here will be a paltry approximation of my appreciation for them. My stepmom Bobbie has been another stalwart supporter. Diane Hail kept me laughing all along. Jordan Carver, Joy Campbell, and Joyce Tilghman have always made me feel like family, and they are family to me. Neither my mother nor my sister lived to see this dissertation completed, but making them proud is one of the things that kept me going at moments when I didn’t perceive a lot of other reasons to do so. I love them and I miss them every day, and this dissertation—and whatever else I write in the future—is for them and because of them. My dad has taken care of me in one way or another for my whole life, no less so during the last seven years. In many ways, it was his influence that led me to an academic career. If this dissertation has an origin story, it’s likely to be found somewhere in those evenings when my dad read to me from a picture book biography of Abraham Lincoln, stayed up late with me, and encouraged my unending questions about what life might have been like “back then.” It is no exaggeration to say that I would not be here at all were it not for Sam Kraus and Taylor Bailey. Sam challenges me, tests me, and keeps me on my toes. There’s no one in the world I’d rather disagree with than Sam, and I always leave those disagreements having learned v something. For most of the past two decades, Taylor has been my partner in life, and I’ve depended on his sometimes tough, often critical, always loving support all the way through. Elisabeth Windle Washington University in St. Louis December 2016 vi for my sister Amy, who showed me I could my mom, who gave me the tools and my dad, who saw me through it vii INTRODUCTION Pleasure in the Past: Queer Nostalgia in the Gay American Century In his part-memoir, part-ethnography, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), the science fiction writer Samuel Delany inhabits a queer mode of nostalgia as he longs for the specific, the local, the particular, and other reparative modes of dwelling in a certain past. Across the first narrative section and the second theoretical section of the book, Delany recalls the sights and sounds awaiting those who visited the porn theatres in Times Square before 1995, when corporations began moving in and shutting down the smaller sex-related businesses. Whatever Delany poses as an unquestionable good of urban life exists in a past he cannot access, writing as he is from the vantage point of the late 1990s. He uses the word “pleasant” to describe the kinds of brief encounters and longer relationships that urban life historically offered—relationships of spontaneous contact rather than strategic networking, which can be brief, are usually face-to-face rather than mediated by telephone or internet, often cut across class and racial boundaries, and occur in public spaces. These public spaces are “humane and functional” rather than sentimental, romantic, or luxurious (90). The unplanned nature of this interaction—indeed, the unplanned nature of Times Square during these years—holds significant appeal for Delany. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, he locates a queer utopia in this past and evokes nostalgic memories of a space and time in which he and others were able to access a structure of humane, functional, and personal interaction. In one revealing anecdote, Delany recalls the period when the Hale-Bopp Comet was visible from earth (1996-97). Narrating the events of a night when, in the company of strangers, he happened to observe the famous comet while walking down the street, he explains how, later, 1 “pleasantness [hung …] under the trees and by the brownstone stoops near which [the event] occurred, months after [the comet had] ellipsed the sun and soared again into solar night.