Bourgeois vs. Queer

Courage, masculinity, and the modern bourgeois panic over gender and sexuality

In almost no American movie before the 1960s does a man fail to use violence on a woman. The gesture of preventing a woman from leaving the room by grabbing her arm is routine in movies into the 1950s even from gentlemanly types like Fred Astaire and Spencer Tracy. Imagine an American bourgeois man doing that now. Less temperate overmastering of women in the movies was practiced frequently, for example by John Wayne, as when in The Quiet Man (1952) he carries off over his shoulders a kicking and screaming Maureen O’Hara. The gentlemen sometimes allow themselves date rape. Even sweet Gary Cooper rapes Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead (1949)—though, you know, she really wanted it. The gentle and bourgeois among early 20^th-century American men appeared to be unhappy about the feminine, and authorized themselves therefore to master and manhandle it.

All the more did they authorize themselves to master and manhandle apparently “feminine” men. These taciturn, tough, pagan, fishing, hunting, boxing, misogynistic, Boy Scouting, anti-mollycoddle, and above all Courageous men became increasingly obsessed with homosexuals, especially gay men, and most especially flamboyantly talkative, effeminate gay men. Recent scholarship on gender history in the United States, summarized by John D’Emilio and Estelle Friedman, has located an “early-twentieth-century crisis in middle-class male gender identity.” [1] The story is paralleled in Britain after the trials of Oscar Wilde (1895) and in Germany after the scandal of Philipp von Eulenburg (1906); though in America the turn against homosexuality took a more violent character. Fag bashing is an especially American sport.

No one before the late 19^th century thought of same-sex affection as defining a whole class of human beings. Homosexual acts even in culturally backward America were never, after the totalitarianism of the early Puritans, viewed with enough distaste to evoke the Biblical penalty—the penalty in Leviticus [18: 22 and 20:13] is, of course, death, as it is there for other appalling crimes, such as cursing your parents or committing adultery [20:9-10]. Abraham Lincoln, it now seems somewhat plausible, was gay; Walt Whitman was without any doubt. Nobody cared much. In fact during the most of 19^th century homosexual acts in America were ignored, until the turn after the Civil War to purity in the Comstock Law and the like, putting the United States in the van of anti-sex countries. Consenting sodomy was not against the law in New York state until the 1890s. Until 2003 it was illegal in Texas. We have emerged from one hundred years of virulent homophobia, comparable to a similar episode in the 13^th century. St. Thomas was in this matter conventional, ranking homosexual acts just below murder.[2] As John Boswell shows in detail, the 13^th century was a local maximum of such attitudes, and Aquinas was going along with them, illogically.[3] Likewise the modern hysteria about unnatural acts.

Public attributions of passive homosexuality in Western societies were shaming always, at any rate for an adult. See for example Catullus 57’s smirking commentary on the sex life of Julius Caesar. But to be ashamed of an active role was something new in the late 19^th century. Wilde was led into the first of his three disastrous trials by a manly desire to challenge for this reason the Marquis of Queensbury, a wretchedly bad choice of sparring partner. In France at about the same time Marcel Proust, though notoriously gay, was ashamed of it, and in order to defend what he imagined was his good name against the charge of unusual tastes engaged repeatedly in courageous if stylized dueling with pistols. No one was ever hurt. Compare bucks in spring. He went to lengths in Remembrance of Things Past (1913) to recast the good loving by a man as love for a woman (“Albert”  “Albertine”), which unfortunately, as he explained to an indignant André Gide, left all the bad loving to the many homosexual characters in the novel.

In France, however, homophobia was merely a matter of social shame, and of occasional high-handedness by police and judges, not of explicit legal sanction. The sole exception was the law passed under the Vichy government, repealed in 1982, raising the legal age of consent to 21 for homosexual liaisons; for heterosexuals it was 15. As Scott Gunther puts it, French law, unlike American or British or German, simply did not mention homosexuality.[4] The French have long been amused by the Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, and German fixation on queers, just as the northerners have long been amused by the French and Italian fixation on being cuckolded.[5] In Shakespeare the balance is “Latin” in this matter, obsessed with cuckoldry yet relaxed about homoeroticism.

Simon Schama notes in the Dutch Republic a startling outbreak in 1740-2 of “a hysterical persecution of homosexuals in a culture that had virtually no history of witchhunts of any kind since the Anabaptists had swung on the gallows two hundred years before.”[6] The laws under which some hundreds of prosecutions were brought in these few years, resulting in some score of executions, dated to the same 1530s, with extensions in 1570. In the Golden Age prosecutions were rare. Schama suggests that up to 1740, during a long time of peace—which is not how one would characterize the earlier Golden Age—“there were time and space for the Dutch to brood over their own identity and the unsettling discrepancy between a heroic past and a prosaic future.”

In Britain the modern law criminalizing male homosexual acts under which Wilde was prosecuted was passed only in bourgeois and long-peaceful 1885, the Labouchère amendment, and was not seriously used for ten years. In America, as typically, the initiative was local, not national, and therefore varied greatly, though it started at about the same time, the 1880s. Something about those 1880s.

It took decades during the very late 19^th and early 20^th centuries for modern gender hysteria to build in the northern countries, though this time the Netherlands was not a part of it. Michael Quinn’s startling Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996) establishes that even Mormon leaders who came to maturity in the 19^th century “looked upon sodomy as less serious than other sexual sins.”[7] A focused faith that God hates fags, the laserlike focus on merely two of the hundreds of prohibitions in Leviticus, took hold even in conservative American Christianity only in the mid- and especially the late-20^th century.

It’s puzzling, this anxiety about homosexuality. Why did a bourgeois Courage seem to require such an angry reaction to the encroachment of The (Alleged) Feminine? The change becoming so apparent around 1900 and building thereafter was sometimes said to have happened because modern life for the bourgeois man allowed too little scope for his physical courage. That is, the men just had to land violent hands on women and gay men because the women and their gay brothers had taken away the other opportunities for manly play, such as gun play. In any event that’s what real American men like Owen Wister and Zane Grey and Jack London and Teddy Roosevelt seemed to be hinting in their gun-happy, feminine-excluding fictions.

In Europe between the Wars, Richard Vinen notes, “political styles become more aggressively masculine.” “In spite of, or perhaps because of, the enfranchisement of women. . . . uniforms and clenched fists dominated demonstrations, and speeches were about ‘struggle,’ ‘battle,’ and ‘the enemy’.”[8] Dating the gender crisis as late as the 1930s, George Chauncey links it to the Depression: “As many men lost their jobs, their status as breadwinners and their sense of mastery over their own futures, the central tenets undergirding their gender status, were threatened.”[9] But in some advanced male imaginations, as I’ve said, homophobia or gynephobia constituting the dark matter to Courage appears a good deal earlier. Before 1914 one can see already for example in Roosevelt the elder and in the strange death of Liberal England the masculinization of political rhetoric and the appeal to military metaphors of struggle—that is, to Kampf.

Wilde’s conviction and jailing for gross indecency in 1895 was a turning point among educated English speakers in the matter of homosexuality, a model application of the Labouchère amendment. The very word “homosexuality” was just becoming known. It appears to date from 1869; though the first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1897. Only with Wilde, argues Alan Sinfield, were effeminacy, arty tastes, love of other men, and those acts of gross indecency bundled together in the bourgeois mind and viewed by straights as horribly dishonorable. For decades afterwards in England the euphemism for sodomy was “unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort.” That was the phrase for example in E. M. Forster’s posthumously published coming-out novel, Maurice, written in 1914.[10] “All these years [since the trials of 1895],” Wilde’s eldest son Cyril, once wrote to his brother Vyvyan,

my great incentive has been to wipe that stain away; to retrieve, if may be, by some action of mine, a name no longer honored in the land. . . . The more I thought of this, the more convinced I became that, first and foremost, I must be a man. There was to be no cry of decadent artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate. . . . [I wish] nothing better than to end in honorable battle for King and Country.[11]

On May 9, 1915 King and Country arranged to wipe away the stain.

Or curing the sickness. The eagerness of American, British, and German doctors after the 1870s to get into the business of social engineering, a half-century in advance of their total victories in drug and licensing laws, played a role in the strange rise of homophobia. Lucy Ann Lodbell, who in the 1850s passed as Reverend Joseph Lodbell without arousing the interest of the legal or medical authorities, and wrote a memoir, was by 1883 reclassified as mentally ill, justifying incarceration in a madhouse. “It is reasonable to consider true sexual perversion,” wrote one Dr. “Wise” about the Reverend’s case, “as always a pathological condition and a peculiar manifestation of insanity.”[12] The turn against same-sex intimacy—intimacy practiced among males in armies and navies always and praised in Hellenizing and Romantic literature through Walt Whitman and A. E. Housman—led to a succession of laws prohibiting gender deviation, something like a men’s version of the women’s push for Prohibition, with likewise a reign of terror half-enforcing the laws.

D’Emilio and Friedman note that the medicalization of homosexuality worked two ways. Especially in a purity-minded America fearful of contagion from immigrants and blacks and other untouchables, it made people think that the unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort was a disease that could be spread by contact, or perhaps “recruitment,” as to a fraternity. Why do young men become gay? Because the parties are better.

Yet at the same time medicalization encouraged Americans to think that homosexuality was an inherited identity rather than a vicious moral failing. Thus Kinsey’s research from the late 1930s on. Certainly the psychiatrists, whose American branch dropped homosexuality as an “illness” only in 1973, though not finally in all versions of the illness until 1986, deserve full credit for a long and manly history of torturing homosexuals. For transsexuals the American, Canadian, and British psychiatrists are still at it, bless ‘em, at, for example, the Clarke Institute in Toronto, named after a famous Canadian eugenicist, and at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and especially the rat psychologists and psychoanalysts among them.

As the second European war approached the fear of the feminine climaxed. In Britain in the twenty years of increasing state power after 1931 prosecutions under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 quintupled. In the 1930s the Nazi state was using with enthusiasm the notorious Paragraph 175—inherited by the German Empire in 1875 from the unusually harsh Prussian code. The Bolsheviks at first legalized homosexuality, in accord with their progressive ideas. But by 1934 they had decided it was just another sign of bourgeois decadence, and did what they usually did with bourgeois decadents.[13]

Alan Turing, the British mathematician of the computer and breaker of the German military code was homosexual. He was fictionalized as heterosexual, by the way, in the movie Enigma: compare Proust’s technique. In 1952, just before the strange business of legal ramifications for private acts began its long unraveling, Turing was sentenced by a court to take female hormones. He reckoned gaily that the sentence was better than the judge’s alternative of prison; or, as he did not say, the psychiatrists’ of electric shock therapy or lobotomy.[14]

During the early 20^th century in American culture as in other Germanic countries one can see the gynephobic and homophobic hysteria of a bourgeois Courage spreading like an oil slick. In the first lines of The Sea Wolf (1904) Humphrey van Weyden, the narrator and victim, introduced as an effete writer of essays on “Poe’s place in American literature” for The Atlantic, “scarcely knows where to begin.” His last name means in Dutch “of the meadows,” van der weyden, and in London’s time evoked the racial degeneration of the Eastern, Hudson-Valley Dutch “aristocracy”—such as Roosevelt [“rose field”]. Van Weyden is a derivative writer, and starts an evident pansy, says Jack London of the West, quite another breed of man-writer, short of saying it.

The scene of the sinking ferry which opens the book is dense with gender anxiety. London spends a page recurring to Van Weyden hearing the “screaming bedlam of women.” So when Van Weyden is swept away by the tide ripping out of the straits from San Francisco Bay, he himself recalls, “I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked.” The Cockney cook from a fatefully passing ship who helps fish him out is “weakly pretty, almost effeminate,” as Cockneys apparently always are. In a transvestite gesture he gives some of his clothes to Van Weyden, who recalls, “I shrank from his hand, my flesh revolted”—whether from the taint of the “hereditary servility” of the Cockney Race or from “his effeminate features” is unclear.

And yet the Cockney assigns effeminacy to Van Weyden himself, a literary gentleman, unproletarian: “you’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ‘ave, more like a lydy’s than any I know of.” When the captain Wolf Larsen appears it is with a great noise of “not namby-pamby oaths,” of which Van Weyden writes with ladylike delicacy, “It should not be necessary to state, at least to my friends, that I was shocked.” The first words Larsen says to Van Weyden are, “You’re a preacher, aren’t you?” The world of women, preachers, and homosexuals recedes as the schooner Ghost speeds towards the seal-hunting grounds and a masculine rebirth.

The novel ends with the formerly effete Van Weyden jerry-rigging an entire ship—“I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!”—and being swooned over by Maud Brewster (“My man”). The former aesthete queer, practically a woman for God’s sake, is redeemed for the manly cult of Courage.[15]

Again, in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, first published in 1929, Joel Cairo, whose very name evokes myths of the love of boys in Araby, is introduced in a page of effeminizing clichés. He was “small-boned,” “his black coat, cut right to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips,” he “came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.” He spoke “in a high-pitched thin voice, and sat down. He sat down primly, crossing his ankles. . . and began to draw off his yellow gloves. . . . Diamonds twinkled on the second and fourth fingers of his left hand . . . . His hands were soft and well cared for.” Cairo pulls out a little gun to frisk Spade: “His dark eyes were humid and bashful and very earnest.” It’s hard to imagine anyone but Peter Lorre in the movie role.

“He lifted Spade’s coat-tail and looked under it. Holding the pistol close to Spade’s back, he put his right hand around Spade’s side and patted his chest,” a mistake in the world of tough heterosexual men: Spade disarms Cairo with a swift turn, and then, for the insult, calmly knocks him out. In the novel (not in the movie) Cairo when he wakes demands with powder-puff indignation, “Why did you strike after I was disarmed?” “‘Sorry,’ Spade said, and grinned wolfishly.”[16] Compare the courageous and intemperate Wolf Larsen. Jack London’s friends called him “Wolf,” and his mansion in California was the Wolf House.[17] All the villains in The Maltese Falcon are queer, which Hammett’s editor tried get him to change. Hammett wouldn’t.[18]

Such passages are impossible in 19^th-century literature in English before Wilde, even in the working-class dime novels and penny dreadfuls, or indeed nowadays outside of the club comedian’s homophobia in search of an easy laugh. In 19^th-century American fiction, for example, crossdressing and the like are common enough—recall Jo in Little Women; or Huck Finn trying to pass in drag­­—but are not particularly sexualized or scorned.

The dime novels referred to gender bending with a calmness that startles the modern reader. Deadwood Dick and pals, male and female, jumped with abandon into and out of drag.[19] The Adventures of Buffalo Bill around 1882 in Beadle’s Boy’s Library of Sport, Story and adventure, Chapter XVIII, “A Clever Disguise,” claims that our hero captured a road agent by posing as a girl rider. “Buffalo Billy got the reward for his capture, and a medal from the company, and he certainly deserved all that he received for his daring exploit in the guise of a young girl, and a pretty one too, the boys said he made, for he had no mustache then, his complexion was perfect, though bronzed, and his waist was as small as a woman’s.”[20] The actual Wild Bill Hickok, too, it appears, was notably androgynous in behavior. But the book taking special, disdainful note of Hickok’s queerness is not contemporary. It looks back from the gender-anxious date of 1930.[21]

Something special, in other words, happens in the half-century of middle-class but tough-guy fiction in America after Owen Wister and Jack London. The fictional shift is especially American, not French or British, though I understand that Argentina at the same time independently developed in Spanish a similar tough-guy fiction.

In The Sun Also Rises (1926) Hemingway’s narrator and alter ego is a figure of ethical seriousness, practicing his American bourgeois ethic in which one pays the price, working for the one true sentence. He observes “a crowd of young men,” homosexuals, coming into a Parisian dance hall, and almost permits his fears to arouse his manly skill at boxing:

I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. . . . I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.[22]

Hemingway was always interested in gender roles, and was sophisticated for his time about homosexuality. He was even sophisticated about transvestism and transsexuality, which was extremely unusual. Aside from the implied transsexuality in his novels, especially his posthumous last, his mother dressed him quite late in girl’s clothing and in the 1920s and 1930s the works of the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis were among his favorite books. It seems like something out of his novels, but is true, that his youngest son Dr. Gregory Hemingway—though well after his father’s death—became Gloria.[23] The narrator’s homophobia in The Sun Also Rises towards “the crowd of young men” cannot simply be assigned to the author. But Hemingway was representing a reaction common then even among sophisticated American men.

The violent fear of being approached by homosexuals is strange when you think about it. What exactly is the big, strong, heterosexual man so terrified of? It’s the talk of the effeminate homosexuals that seems to arouse the violence, just as for white men in America it was the talk of blacks or the talk of women. Or the talk of trade union organizers—in The Grapes of Wrath it is the agitators, the talkers such as Jim Casy the ex-preacher, whom the growers’ cops swing on.

In The Naked and the Dead (1948) Norman Mailer’s alter ego jokes to his Harvard classmates in fictional 1941, “You know when nothing else is left I’m going to become a fairy, not a goddamn little nance, you understand”—one imagines college juniors swinging drunkenly, anxiously on a talkative little nance behind Copley Square—“but a nice upright pillar of the community, live on green lawns. Bisexual. Never a dull moment, man or woman, it’s all the same to you, exciting.”[24] Compare Cary Grant playing Cole Porter in 1946, just before even a little gentle, veiled jesting about homosexuality became taboo in Hollywood. The Motion Picture Code had already in 1934 forbidden anything more explicit. Published casting directories for American stage and film in the first decades of the 20^th century had routine categories for “nance” or “pansy” actors. Edward Everett Horton, for example, backed up Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937), apparently in order to make the less-than-macho Astaire believable as a leading man.

The fear that femininity would take over, emasculating the bourgeois man, a fear to be resisted by boxing or going fishing or watching bull fights or even indulging an occasional urge to swing on the talkative less-than-macho men, or by manhandling women, is a theme in every Hemingway novel from The Sun Also Rises (1926) to the very posthumous The Garden of Eden (1986, drafted 1948-1958). Though, I repeat, considering how he toyed always with gender-crossing themes, Papa is not quite so simple as this. Kathy Willingham argues ingeniously for example that the woman Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises is not merely a fearful man-eater, as contemporary critics uniformly said, but a matador, the most admired man in Hemingway’s mythology—pretty and small and coy and dressed in smooth silks, taunting the bull.[25] She’s not called “Mary” or “Jane,” after all, but the highly gender-ambiguous “Brett.” But if Hemingway’s gender talk is not quite so simple-minded as it first appears, it encompasses the simplicity, and the swinging on them, too.

The white male bourgeoisie seemed to fear an improbable alliance among women and gays and blacks, who had all of them before the 1960s been nicely silenced. In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) the black hero, a mild and studious boy, is saved from the machinations of his (black) college president and the president’s (white) tycoon trustees by the . . . wait for it . . . homosexual son of the last tycoon.

The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.

[1] D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 1997, p. v.

[2] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, Book III, part 2, Chp. 122

[3] Boswell, Christianity, 1980, Chp. 10, and esp. Chp. 11, pp. 318-30 on Aquinas.

[4] Gunther, La Construction, 1995.

[5] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, pp. 116-118, 114.

[6] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 601. The next quotation is from p. 605.

[7] Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics, 1996, p. 367.

[8] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 154.

[9] Chauncy, Gay New York, 1994, p. 353.

[10] Sinfield, Wilde Century, 1994, pp. 3, 140.

[11] Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (1954), quoted in Sinfield, The Wilde Century, p. 126.

[12] D’Emilio and Freedman, Sexual Matters, 1997, pp. 124, 129.

[13] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 117,

[14] Hodges, Alan Turing, 1983, pp. 458, 462, 471.

[15] London, Sea Wolf, 1904, pp. 3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17, 20, 280; “I did it,” p. 274.’ “My man,” p. 280.

[16] Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 1929, Chps. IV and V (pp. 46-47, 49-50, 53).

[17] Dickey, notes in Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 1929 (1984), p. 293.

[18] Pierpont, “Tough Guy,” 2002, p. 70

[19] Brown, “Reading the West,” in Brown, Reading, 1997, p. 38.

[20] Vol. 1, No. 1, Chapter XVIII, “Stanford’s Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection, http://www-sul.stanford. edu/depts/ dp/pennies/home.html.

[21] Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics, 1996, p. 35, quoting Stuart Henry, Conquering Our Great American Plains,1930: Hickok “seemed effeminate,” “feminine,” “sissy,” pp. 271, 275-276, 288.

[22] Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, 1926, p. 28.

[23] Willingham, “Sun Hasn’t Set,” 2002, p. 42 and Wagner-Martin, “The Romance of Desire,” 2002, p. 54.

[24] Mailer, Naked and the Dead, 1948, p. 340.

[25] Willingham, “Sun Hasn’t Set,” 2002, throughout.