The Queening of America

David Van Leer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136038464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Since at least the end of the nineteenth century, gay culture - its humour, its icons, its desires - has been alive and sometimes even visible in the midst of straight American society. David Van Leer puts forward here a series of readings that aim to identify what he calls the "queening" of America, a process by which "rhetorics and situations specific to homosexual culture are presented to a general readership as if culturally neutral." The Queening of America examines how the invisibility of gay male writing, especially in the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated the crossing of gay motifs in straight culture. Van Leer then critiques some current models of making homosexuality visible (the packaging of Joe Orton, the theories of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the rise of gay studies), before concluding more optimistically with the possible alliances between gay culture and other minority discourses.

1

THE QUEENING OF AMERICA

Gay Writers of Straight Fiction

The following news item appeared in the Sacramento Bee on Tuesday, September 30, 1986:

NEW YORK (UPI)—A man who mugged an ailing monkey by holding a knife to its throat and warning its owner, “Give me your money or I’ll cut the monkey’s head off,” was the target of a police search Monday.

The monkey, known as Mr. Mike, was “shaken but uninjured” in the attack, police spokesman Peter O’Donnell said. The weapon—a 9-inch kitchen knife—was not recovered. The monkey mugging occurred about 4 p.m. Sunday in front of a posh Fifth Avenue department store where Mr. Mike and his owner had gone begging to help pay $1,200 worth of veterinary bills for Mr. Mike’s rehabilitation from a stroke, his owner said.

The pair, Mr. Mike, a 2 1/2-year-old Guenon blue-face Monkey and Anthony Agnello, 26, an out-of-work striptease artist from Southbury, Conn., have cut the vet bill down to $500 through the kindness of strangers in recent weeks, Agnello said.

But the mugger was anything but kind when he approached man and monkey and asked to hold Mr. Mike, who performed his own striptease until his paws were left paralyzed by the stroke.

Two girls had stopped to donate money and as one held the disabled simian, the man pulled out the knife, grabbed Mr. Mike’s collar and held the knife to his throat, Agnello said. The mugger threatened, “Give me your money or I’ll cut the monkey’s head off,” Agnello told the police.

Agnello handed the mugger $100 he had collected during the day but the man grabbed Mr. Mike and ran, using the monkey as a shield until he was clear of the crowd that gathered, Agnello said.

The mugger then “slammed Mr. Mike down into the pavement” and fled, Agnello told the New York Daily News. Police Officer Peter Sutherland, called to the scene, brought Mr. Mike and Agnello to the police station to view mug shots, but the effort was futile.

“I was hoping Mr. Mike could pick out the guy,” Agnello said.

In California the report seems just another example of the horrors of Manhattan: the headline reads, “In New York, they mug monkeys.” But this fleeting confrontation among differently situated individuals offers a model for the kind of cross-cultural exchanges that will be central throughout this book. Its components are simple enough. A young man from Connecticut comes to Manhattan to beg on Fifth Avenue for his recuperating pet. Two women stop to hold the animal and give the owner some money. A mugger holds a knife to the monkey’s throat and, after receiving money, runs away. At some indeterminate time after his flight, two policemen appear, one to process the complaint and another to present it to the Daily News.

The newspaper version of the incident is structured around contrasts—between city and suburb, man and monkey, beggar and robber, officer and victim. Yet these pairs are not truly parallel, and the journalist’s relation to them varies. Most obviously, the article’s attitude towards the mugger is ambiguous. The comic tone of the account only barely contains its celebration of violence. It is after all the mugger, with his long knife and aggressive actions, who affords the incident its narrative momentum. The journalist relishes (and quotes twice) the man’s graphic threat to “cut the monkey’s head off.”

The mugger’s power is implicitly acknowledged in the article’s respect for his narrative counterparts—Officers O’Donnell and Sutherland. Although neither is essential to understanding the incident, both policemen are named in full and treated as models of authority. Despite their inability to change the shape of the event—to do anything more than take down and pass on other people’s accounts—they are presented as if they are actively engaged in pursuit and retribution. The initial paragraph casts the incident as a struggle for revenge between two morally opposed but equally powerful forces—the searching police and the “targeted” mugger. Only later does the journalist double back to introduce those initially victimized.

This tension between the narrative’s initial revenge plot and its subsequent shift to the motif of victimization determines the piece’s odd characterization of the docile owner—Anthony Agnello. If at first the mugger seems the villain of the piece, by its end the victimized Agnello bears the brunt of the journalist’s scorn. Whatever our sympathies for Mr. Mike, they do not extend to his owner. Agnello is not even named until halfway through the account, and then only in a subordinate clause. The policemen’s profession and rank are dignified with capital letters; Agnello’s is doubly ridiculed. His livelihood is denigrated through the use of the antiquated term “striptease artist,” rather than the more neutral “dancer” or “model.” He is even (somewhat inconsistently) criticized for his failure to succeed in a career already deemed unworthy.

More important, Agnello has no individuality in the piece. Although the ultimate source for most of the information in the article, Agnello is rarely allowed to speak for himself. Presumably the text paraphrases rather closely Agnello’s account to the police. Yet he is not quoted directly until the article’s last lines. Even then he offers not his words but those of the mugger, repeating the threat of decapitation with which the article opened. Only in the article’s final sentence does he uninterruptedly speak his own words. His statement—that he was hoping Mr. Mike could identify a mug shot—in its admission of Agnello’s inability even to recognize his assailant stands as the journalist’s parting sneer: clearly the monkey is the brains of this particular couple.

Agnello’s weakness is not simply attacked by the journalist. His sentimental fecklessness is coded as homosexual effeminacy, and contrasted to the more admirable masculinity of both mugger and police. The most obvious clue is visual: the accompanying photograph shows a face of delicate features (and perhaps mascara) cradling a traumatized monkey, who nevertheless stares boldly into the camera, while the owner himself turns demurely away [Figure 1]. Yet the prose also carries sexual implications. The unnecessary reference to Agnello’s occupation as stripper is probably intended as a clue to his deviance. Whatever the sexual interests of their audiences, a disproportionate number of male nude dancers are gay. Even the monkey’s name of “Mr. Mike” would be hint enough for many readers. The hypermasculine combination of the butch monosyllable with the unnecessary “mister” illustrates the kind of stylish excess associated with gay slang; “Mr. Mike” is a name for hair dressers and fashion designers. If comic overstatement was not Agnello’s intention in naming the monkey, it is the journalists in ridiculing the name. The narrative’s constant repetition of “Mr. Mike” emphasizes its comic character. Although Agnello is rarely mentioned outside the tag “Agnello said,” Mr. Mike is named ten times in the twelve sentences.

The sexual implications of Agnello’s fragility are reinforced by his relation to the two anonymous women of the narrative. It is easy to miss the presence of the kindly “girls,” for the journalist obscures and trivializes their role. Yet they are centrally involved in the incident. It is their expression of generosity towards Agnello that first exposes the monkey to the assault. Although the narrative is vague on this point, the mugger seems to have placed his knife against Mike’s throat while one girl was still holding him. In her arms Mr. Mike is cut off from even Agnello’s slight protection. The indirect attack on Agnello through his monkey more immediately attacks the kindly woman, whose hand (not to say body) is also endangered by the knife drawn against Mike. And the phallic “nine inches” of blade that threaten Agnello with symbolic violation represent an even more powerful menace of rape for the woman actually holding the animal. For the journalist, however, victimization only marks weakness, and no concern is afforded the threatened “girl,” who is never again mentioned or (evidently) questioned.

The journalist’s reshaping of this (admittedly factual) incident then can be read as a form of sexual allegory, built around two very different relations to the monkey. On the one hand there are the figures of masculine authority—the mugger and the two policemen. They are the characters fighting to ensure Mike’s civil liberties. On the other hand are the helpless figures of the two women and of Agnello himself. These passive characters stand at the piece’s emotional center. Yet the journalist does not really credit the importance of their emotion. As a “human interest” story, the article depends on the readers’ automatic sympathy for the cute animal. Yet despite the sentimentality of our response to the monkey, we are asked to identify as weak those within the narrative who respond similarly. The women evaporate entirely from the account. And Agnello’s affection for and attention to his monkey are discounted, leaving him with only his unemployment and victimization.

My point, however, is not the emotional inconsistencies of a throw-away news item. Perhaps in their pursuit of a minimalist “masculine” style, all journalists are tempted to stigmatize as “feminine” the difference between political “news” and personal “anecdote.” And given the audience for most such articles, the knee-jerk misogyny and homophobia of the human interest page go pretty much without saying. What is interesting is not the predictable ways in which the piece reproduces the insensitivities of its culture. The key moment instead is one the article’s author does not control, the one exchange when Agnello may override the journalist’s insensitivities. In the sentence where he is first named, Agnello is said to have “cut the vet bill down to $500 through the kindness of strangers in recent weeks.” The reporter, in a toughness borrowed from Theodore Dreiser by way of Jack Webb’s Dragnet, responds, “But the mugger was anything but kind.”

The reporter’s condescension toward Agnello’s fragility is consistent with his tone throughout the article. But this particular put-down misses the mark; for it fails to see that Agnello is himself quoting from a different literary source, countering the reporter’s Sergeant Friday with his own Blanche DuBois. At the end of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, the protagonist Blanche is committed to an insane asylum. She falsely believes that the doctor and nurse who arrive to institutionalize her are taking her to cruise the Caribbean with a former beau. Upon first discovering her error, Blanche runs away in terror. When she realizes, however, that there is no longer space for her in the hostile environment of her sister’s household, she acquiesces, and apologizes for her reaction with her final words in the play (and one of contemporary dramas most resonant lines): “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”¹

This phrase has subsequently become—at least among gay males—a clichéd expression of homosexual alienation, and Agnello’s quotation of the line is probably a mindless parroting, part of the same sensibility that named his monkey. Yet in voicing this cliché, Agnello unconsciously assumes the authority of a gay cultural tradition strong enough to undermine the hard-boiled street smarts of the reporter. Previously silenced in the account, Agnello, through quotation, speaks his own words. Although the journalist presents them as paraphrase, Agnello undoubtedly said the words “the kindness of strangers.” He thus forces his voice into the account a full seven paragraphs before the writer intentionally permits him to speak. Moreover, once Agnello speaks, the journalist has trouble reestablishing his authority. The phrase implicitly locates the journalist’s sneers about Agnello’s pet (and employment) within a larger context of sexual ostracism and scapegoating, substituting for the article’s dismissal of gay incompetence the celebration via Williams’s phrase of gays as martyrs of refinement and breeding. In dismissing Agnello with his response that “the stranger was anything but kind,” the journalist is himself forced to take up the gay cliché—speaking not his own words but those of Agnello and of Williams before him.

The intricacies of this ephemeral anecdote epitomize the complex ways in which gays and straights actually interact, both in their everyday conversations and in their literary representations. Too often sexuality is represented as a battle between opposing armies, both fully cognizant of their own goals and of the character of the enemy.

This militaristic model focuses on a history of incrimination and distrust, in which empowered homophobes oppress timorous closeted men and the women who admire them. Such a model is uni-directional—concerned with the oppressors’ perception of the oppressed but not with minorities’ manipulation of (or indifference to) those perceptions. Although there is no reason to deny the pervasiveness of homophobia, it is important to see, as the anecdote about Agnello suggests, that confrontation is only one of many avenues to power. Most social intercourse involves not coherent conversations, but densely coded improvisations between groups barely conscious of their own identities or of the differences between them. And often minorities speak most volubly between the lines, ironically reshaping dialogues the oppressor thinks he controls or even finding new topics and modes of speaking to which the oppressor himself lacks access.

This chapter explores some of these less overt skirmishes in the battles over sexuality, and especially how homosexuals more celebrated than Agnello have exploited invisibility in their writing. In fiction, evidence of homosexuality is usually sought in characters, plots, and settings that explicitly represent sexual difference. My analysis, however, focuses on the language itself, turning from the visible to the verbal, from homosexual narratives to homosexual dictions, rhythms, rhetorics. The sexual character of language is rarely direct, and post-Stonewall criticism has occasionally stigmatized such writing as “closeted.” But just as invisibility does not impede all forms of speech, so the refusal to identify one’s personal interests can facilitate other kinds of gay statements.² The verbal jockeying for position that characterizes the brief exchanges among Agnello, the police, the mugger, and the girls will reappear throughout this study of popular discourse among gays and straights. Like Agnello, gay writers found in certain linguistic strategies a voice of their own long before sexuality was spoken of openly. And like the UPI reporter, straight readers responding to this voice can unintentionally find themselves speaking someone else’s language. Only by charting linguistic sallies across such indistinct cultural borders can we understand the complementary processes by which homosexuals and heterosexuals together create meaning, and distinguish what is truly hidden from what is simply unseen, that which is never spoken from that which is seldom heard.

Camp Crossing

Camp is the best-known gay linguistic style, occupying within male homosexual culture roughly the same position as “playing the dozens” or “signifyin” within African American culture. A complex of loosely defined theatricalisms, camp imitates the hyperbole of musicals and popular movies as well as other visual extravagances like overstated decor and fashion, and especially cross-dressing. In its verbal forms, it favors quotation, mimicry, lip-synching, gender inversion, trenchant put-downs, and bad puns. Between World War II and Stonewall, such theatricalisms were epitomized by the stylized performances of gay drag queens. The most influential definition of the phenomenon was offered by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Here Sontag identified camp as a variety of pure aestheticism, which uses artifice and stylization to empty the world of content. Seeing “everything in quotation marks,” camp thrives on exaggeration, theatricality, travesty, and the glorification of character. Though serious in rejecting traditional aesthetic judgment, it is a “sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.”³

Sontag’s reading has been criticized for overstating the aesthetic dimension of camp. To clarify the phenomenon’s relation to other postmodern styles she thought resistant to interpretation—Barthesian semiology, Artaudian Theater of Cruelty—Sontag understated its relation to the gay community. Although quotations from Oscar Wilde introduce each new section of the essay, homosexuality, whether Wilde’s or anyone else’s, is not mentioned until the final pages of the piece. In de-homosexualizing camp, Sontag also de-politicized it. Separating camp from the cultural conditions that fostered it, she obscured the specific problems of ostracization and invisibility the style was created to address.⁴

Sontag’s account is surely incomplete. Yet critics have found it difficult to say exactly what is wrong with her argument. In delineating a definitively homosexual history of camp, gay theorists can seem to engage in turf war. It is impossible to prove who “owns” camp. One’s answers always depend on how the phenomenon is defined: those who include in camp Bellini’s Norma or London’s Carnaby Street offer very different genealogies from those who see camp only in explicitly gay activities. The very language of “ownership” is dangerous. What begins in acceptance, acknowledging participation in a style, ends in aggression, claiming camp as a possession. Demonstrations of how a particular ironic style functioned in a certain way for the gay community tend to internalize camp as something more fundamental—a “natural” part of the gay sensibility. One is left with paradoxical questions about what happens to camp when it travels outside its gay origins—what camp is when it’s not at home—without ever clarifying what it might mean to call a word, a gesture, or a punchline “gay.”

Although correctly identifying the limitations of Sontag’s formulations, her critics may misrepresent both her project and their own. To understand more neutrally what is at stake in these ownership debates, I wish to turn to a roughly contemporary use of camp—in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? From the profanity of its opening line “Jesus H. Christ,” Edward Albee’s 1962 play assaults audiences with a hyperbolic account of sexual tensions in a quiet academic community. Yet one aspect of this assault is as striking for its form as for its intensity. Having established only the characters’ names and the late hour, Albee begins the first of many fights that occupy most of the play’s dialogue. Looking around the room, Martha “imitates Bette Davis” wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Queening of America
• 2 Saint Joe
• 3 The Beast of the Closet
• 4 The Body Negative
• 5 What Lola Got
• Notes
• Index