The Gay and Lesbian Presence in American Literature
by David Bergman
Of course, we know the answer to this question, or rather the answers to this
question. Homosexuality is the last great taboo of American society. Soldiers
who say they are ready to die for their country refuse to take showers with
homosexuals. Those who would defend to the death the right of freedom of
speech would rather people kept mum about their homosexuality. In education,
parents fear that talk of homosexuality will promote its practice or recruit
young people, although I have never met anyone who was recruited into the ranks
of the queer; conversely, I've never heard anyone explain why all the talk of
heterosexuality hasn’t made everyone straight. Teachers feel
uncomfortable discussing sexual preference; students are often uncomfortable
when the topic is raised, and administrators feel the legislators, alumni, or
the press will object and (dare I use the phrase?) blow the subject out of
proportion.
Some of these fears are exaggerated. I have never had a student object to my
treating lesbian and homosexual subjects in class, but I have known colleagues
who have had students object. Indeed, my students seem particularly interested
in the subject, and the topic stirs lively discussions. The love that once
dared not speak its name is currently the topic on the lips of every talk show
host on daytime television. And one wonders what Geraldo, Sally Jesse, or Phil
would do during a tight ratings week without gays and lesbians.
Nevertheless, students are not used to hearing talk of lesbians and gay men in
the classroom, and teachers setting out to raise the topic (and I am
always the first to broach the subject; don’t expect students to
raise it on their own) had better be prepared for the dead silence that awaits
them initially. A class that has been listless and inattentive becomes
suddenly all ears at the first mention of the word. The women look up
suspiciously, the guys defiantly. I’ve had to become accustomed to this
silence, this unswerving attention. But after this moment of suspicion and
defiance is past, and as soon as the students are sure you’re not speaking
about them, they show an avid interest in the topic. Everyone seems to
have an opinion and the variety of views and lack of consensus is both
marvelous to behold and troublesome to witness. Myth, misinformation, and
bigotry stand next to truth and insight, expressed with equal intensity.
Somehow the classes go on, generating more light than darkness.
My success in teaching gay and lesbian literature is not because
students know I am gay. I’m always surprised that so many of them think I
am straight. (I’m, in fact, rather reticent about my personal life
because of both temperament and philosphy. I prefer to think I’m in the
classroom to teach a course, not to involve the students in my psychodramas.)
Whatever success I have is, I think, a result of the way I handle that moment
of silence when the whole class is testing to see how I will address the topic.
I have learned that I avoid student opposition and generate open discussion if
I follow three rules.
First, the discussion must arise from trying to understand the work
before us. It cannot be gratuitous. What does Whitman mean by manly love ?
To whom are Rich’s Twenty-one Love Poems addressed? Why is the erotic
world of Africa so incompatible with Christian ethics in Countee Cullen’s
Heritage ? What is the beast in The Beast in the Jungle ? If the subject
arises from trying to understand the text, one avoids two problems. First it
immediately answers the questions: why does it matter whether the author is
lesbian or gay? What relevance does it have to the work? When the topic of
homosexuality arises from trying to locate more precisely the meaning of a
passage, image, or symbol, it is clear why such considerations are not only
relevant but essential to understanding the work as completely as possible.
Second, it keeps the work from being read only as an expression of a
person’s sexuality.
I have found that mentioning a writer’s sexuality at the beginning of a
discussion gets in the way. Students who harbor prejudices tend to pigeonhole
the work without really reading it, refusing to address its complexities.
Homophobic students will simply dismiss the work and you. They will claim that
you’re trying to shove queer works in their face. Or the brighter and
more accepting ones will accuse you of reading the work through the lens of the
author’s sexuality. Also, gay and lesbian students will project their
experience on to a text without regard to what the author is actually saying.
If students are first engaged in understanding the text, then they are more
willing to engage in understanding how sexuality influences the way we read a
work and how sexuality affects the way the work is constructed.
Second, I adopt an entirely matter-of-fact tone. I want the students to feel
that I see them as adults and, as adults, we can discuss these matters openly,
freely, and thoughtfully in the effort to understand. Students look for signs
of a teacher’s bias one way or the other. I like to show them that what I
expect of them is no more than a mature, frank, and relevant discussion of the
topic. Of course, there are times when the students’ ignorance and
immaturity show (or the mere weight of traditional thinking). Once, while I
taught Audre Lorde’s Walking Out Boundaries, a student made the comment
that her love for another woman was unnatural. And the issue of naturalness
comes up all the time, even among better-educated audiences. I’ve found
several ways to deal with this issue. The first is to ask what the student
means by natural. This leads to quite an extended discussion, and I only ask
such questions when I have time and a mature-enough class for such a
discussion. The other useful strategy the one I use when time is short is to
ask: But how does Lorde regard her relationship? How does the garden imagery
work in this poem? How is the poem a response to the widely-held belief that
lesbian relationships are unnatural? In short, I try to use homophobic
comments as a way of voicing the cultural context in which lesbian and gay
literature is situated, the background against which it moves. Indeed,
recently I have found that my students tend to underestimate the prejudice
against gays and lesbians. They are shocked to hear that people have regularly
lost their jobs, careers, and livelihoods when their sexuality was exposed.
What I don’t find useful is to lecture students about understanding and
consideration for others. Such straightforward tactics lead to charges that
the teacher is bullying, and also limit discussion and intellectual
exploration. However, I don’t allow students to gush hate without
challenging their prejudices.
By linking the discussion to a specific textual issue and by presenting an
example of mature frankness to my students, I usually pre-empt the worst
expressions of homophobia. Sometimes students use such words as dyke
and fag. As a rule, I don’t allow such words to be used in class,
but I recall one occasion when I was teaching Hart Crane’s My
Grandmother’s Love Letters, a poem that I’m afraid doesn’t
appear in the Heath, when I let the word fag pass. In the poem,
Crane asserts that his grandmother would be less sympathetic to his love
letters than he was to hers, and I asked the students what sorts of things
might block maternal sympathy and understanding. There was a long silence, and
then from the back of the class a student, a young man who had been at pains to
show his machismo all through the semester, began to speak: Was he . . . a
fag? he asked. I wouldn’t want my grandmother to know that about me.
And what do you make of the ‘sound of gently pitying laughter’? I
asked.
The world is laughing at him for even thinking for a second that she might
understand. Exactly. It’s real sad, he said. This is a real sad
poem.
In this case the student was struggling to see the world through Crane’s
eyes. Perhaps for the first time in his life he began, despite himself, to
understand what many gay people go through, and for that far more important
lesson, I was willing to put off challenging the use of fag .
The last rule for avoiding resistance to lesbian and gay literature is to
prepare for such a discussion by speaking about heterosexuality. I think one
of the problems in discussing gay and lesbian issues and why students might
complain that gays and lesbians are getting special treatment is that there
is a presumption of heterosexuality when teaching other texts. Sexual desire
can’t be merely a topic that arises in lesbian and gay literature; we must
make it a topic relevant to heterosexual material as well. In fact, students
are often less sympathetic to heterosexual depictions of erotic desire than
they are to homosexual depictions. How they dislike the Frost of The
Subverted Flower or Provide, Provide or the swaggering Williams in Danse
Russe, poems I find myself defending against their rather strict notions of
propriety. (Students have terrible difficulty finding a way to speak about
sexuality that is neither sanctimonious nor ribald. Their minds are either in
the clouds or the gutter. A certain lightness of tone in these discussions can
do them a world of good. In fact, the most resistance I get is in a British
literature survey to the combining of spiritual and erotic love in Donne and
Herbert.) If sexuality is an issue that has been discussed, then homosexuality
and lesbianism become logical and unavoidable extensions of the topic. This
approach will also correct that false impression that gay men and women are
sex-obsessed.
You may have noticed that most of my examples have been from American poetry,
rather than from American prose. With some exceptions Billy Budd is the most
obvious example the fiction and non-fiction selections keep away from the
topic, even, I must admit, in The Heath Anthology of American
Literature. It seems to me that poets maybe because of the example of
Whitman have been and continue to be more up front about sexual issues than
prose writers, or at least more able to get their homosexual and lesbian works
into anthologies. Part of the reason is the different ways people react to
prose and poetry. A friend of mine has for decades written highly confessional
poems without objection, but when he came to write a memoir, a chorus of former
friends rose up in opposition, and threatened to sue him. In verse,
homosexuality can be read as merely metaphor; in prose it appears pornographic.
(One sees the same sort of difference between painted and photographed nudes.
Eakin’s The Swimming Hole can grace the covers of textbooks, but a
Mapplethorpe nude would encounter howls of protest.)
I advise supplementing any anthology with additional reading. Adrienne
Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience and Audre
Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power can fit alongside
of a study of their poetry. Indeed Lorde’s essay on The Erotic as Power
compliments nicely the poem Power, which is included in The Heath
Anthology. Both the Rich and Lorde essays are reprinted in The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993). A colleague of mine has enormous
success in her class with a short, powerful excerpt from Armistead
Maupin’s More Tales of the City (Harper, 1980), a letter in which
Michael Tolliver, the gay hero of the series, comes out to his parents (159).
The passage’s literary quality is, I admit, not the highest, but it
expresses feelings that gay and lesbian students understand and with which
heterosexual students can sympathize. I can think of two works which will do
very well in a large number of American literature classes: James
Baldwin’s The Outing, included in Going to Meet the Man (Dial,
1965), is a classic coming-of-age story. Edmund White, the finest gay writer
to emerge since Stonewall, has a story An Oracle in the collection The
Darker Proof (NAL, 1988), which presents AIDS in light of the transatlantic
and transcendental spiritual themes which are often used as threads in American
literature courses.
Several years ago there were very few books that instructors could use to help
them understand gay and lesbian literature. Today there are monographs and
journals that cover the topic. Several general studies are especially helpful:
Bonnie Zimmerman’s The Safe Sea of Women (Beacon, 1990), Claude J.
Summers’s Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall (Continuum, 1990),
Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing edited
by Joseph Bristow (Routledge, 1992), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical
Revisions (New York U P, 1990) edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, and
my own book Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American
Literature (Wisconsin, 1991). These are starting places.
I began by saying that gay male literature (and to a lesser extent lesbian
literature) is already in the canon if we simply look for it. But I think
there are lesbian and gay works that have been excluded from the canon not only
because they are explicitly homosexual or lesbian, but because they express a
sensibility that heterosexual critics have marginalized. The best example of
this marginalization comes from British literature in Ronald Firbank, whose
seemingly trivial works have been central to many gay and lesbian writers
after him. In American literature, I think Jane Bowles is often left out of
courses because her works look too marginal. In fact, I don’t think that
even gay scholars have a clear idea of what the outlines of gay and lesbian
writers’ finest work could be. It seems to me that Alfred Chester, almost
completely lost, but now slowly emerging from obscurity, could be a major
writer we have overlooked. And James Purdy is an extremely important writer
though his work is very hard to evaluate. And there are others. I am not
content with the idea that the lesbian and gay writers who have slipped into
the canon are really the finest gay and lesbian writers, but rather those who
have, in Roger Austen’s chilling phrase, been most successful at playing
the game of heterosexual taste. I can imagine the shape of future Heath
Anthologies to be rather different once lesbian and gay scholars begin
seriously examining their literary heritage, just as feminist and ethnic
critics have revamped the anthology we have now.
Unlike African American literature or Asian American literature or even Jewish
American literature, the teaching of lesbian and gay literature does not
necessarily require opening the canon to new authors. It does require,
however, opening our eyes to what is already there. I can’t imagine
teaching a course in American literature that entirely eliminated all lesbian
and male homosexual writers. How could one get through a course completely
silent about Walt Whitman, Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, H.D., Herman
Melville, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein,
Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich? I suspect that all teachers of American
literature assign at least some of these writers because the story of American
literature can’t be told without acknowledging lesbian and gay writers,
although it has often been told by ignoring that they were gay and lesbian and
by omitting works that speak most clearly about their sexual orientation. The
late Thomas Yingling wrote that gay male writers were permitted to speak but
not to tell. It is also true of teachers of American literature we speak about
these authors, but often we do not tell. Why this silence?