Facing the Abyss by George Hutchinson

Author:George Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

7

QUEER HORIZONS

Writing in 1951, John W. Aldridge, in addition to drawing attention to the pervasiveness of fiction dealing with African American and Jewish experience in the 1940s, contended that “a strong preoccupation with homosexuality as a literary theme runs through nearly all the novels the young writers have produced, and it has become one of their most distinguishing characteristics as well as the most curious.”1 Leslie Fiedler opened his famous essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’n, Huck Honey” (1948) with the statement, “It is perhaps to be expected that the Negro and the homosexual should become stock literary themes in a period when the exploration of responsibility and failure has become again a primary concern of our literature.”2

A pervasive and extraordinarily frank treatment of sex and, especially, non-normative sexuality comes into focus when reading the 1940s, often in connection with the heritage and continuing practices of racial oppression. This conjuncture is puzzling: is it because one’s race and sex (today we might say gender and sexual orientation) were the two primary aspects of identity no one was allowed to choose? Both were starkly bifurcated in absolute terms within the discourses and social norms of the time. In the “queer” time of World War II—“the duration”—such norms were destabilized in the American literary imagination.

John Costello, who came to the topic after writing a bestselling book about the war, pointed out: “Sex and sexuality in all its guises and complexities played an extensive role in the war experience.… It enhanced intimacy and the expression of love that liberated many people from traditional inhibitions.”3 Freud had observed that in societies at war the usual repressions of the sex drive are partially lifted. The fear of death, the general social upheaval and rearrangements associated with the draft, and widespread physical uprooting from people’s normal environments all contributed to a loosening of sexual mores.

While a kind of “war aphrodisia” (and mass rape) had long been associated with battle and its aftermath, in the period of “total war” the boundaries of normative sexuality lost their purchase on a much broader scale. The time was queer. A gay journalist in Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar observes that “The war has caused a great change. Inhibitions have broken down. All sorts of young men are trying out all sorts of new things, away from home and familiar taboos.”4 Costello, a historian, echoes this opinion: “The mobilization, disruption, and excitement of so many lives was not only a catalyst of social change, but it also sowed the seeds of a far-reaching shift in private and public sexual attitudes.”5 In literature, explicit treatments of sexuality became commonplace in the same years that Alfred Kinsey collected and reported the controversial results of his research on the sexual behavior of the human male.

According to John d’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, “World War II could be considered the birth moment of modern gay and lesbian history.”6 This is not to say that homosexuality was “accepted”—not by a long shot.

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