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Wonder boys: tales of the extraordinarily queer adolescent
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Content
WONDER BOYS: TALES OF THE EXTRAORDINARILY
QUEER ADOLESCENT
by
Jeffrey L. Bohn
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
December 2006
Copyright 2006 Jeffrey L. Bohn
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my father Helmer Otto “Bud” Bohn and
to my mother, Floy, for their love and support. A big thank you to my brother, Brad,
whose irreverence is always welcome and often needed. A special thank you and love
to Shantanu DuttaAhmed for seeing me through this process and without whom I
could not imagine my life. I also thank Tania Modleski for her patience and support as
well as the other members of my committee: Teresa McKenna, James Kincaid,
Vincent Cheng, Alice Gambrell, Marita Sturken, and Larry Gross. Thanks also to Joan
Jastrebski, Jennifer Morrow and Mary Beth Tegan…all those miles we hiked helped
me more than any of you will ever know. And thank you to Vidhu “Veda” Aggarwal
for walks on the beach, laughing at “the journey” and Santa Monica Sunset
Sandwiches.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Burning Down the House: Truman Capote and the Politics of Home 9
Chapter 2: Haunted America: John Rechy and (Re)membering Home 56
Chapter 3: Paul Monette and the Typographies of Home 94
Chapter 4: Siegfried and Roy: Escape to Queer Mountain 134
Endnotes 158
Bibliography 161
iv
ABSTRACT
This project explores how different novelists and performers situate fantasies
of queer adolescence through particular culturally constructed spaces of home. Central
to this analysis is the figure of the "Wonder Boy." Memoirs and narratives of queer
adolescence tend to construct the central subject as "extra-ordinary" to use Biddy
Martin's term. In these works, the central characters' difference is articulated via non-
normative physical traits, cross-gender characteristics (the inversion trope), deviant
behaviors--the mother's boy, etc. The queer child is often described as a genius,
gifted, and therefore perceptive to the ways in which he is culturally read and to the
ways in which his childhood is different from a "normative" one. Through the works
of Truman Capote, John Rechy, Paul Monette, and the Las Vegas entertainers
Siegfried and Roy, varying processes of inscription are explored in a series of
narratives that allow for a rethinking and re-articulation of the relationship between
spatial configurations of home and the formation and performance of queer identity.
With ”home” as a site of “mandatory and compulsory” heterosexuality within
these narratives, the figuration of the child's relationship to rooms, to occupants of
those rooms, and to the rules prescribed for behavior in them, also becomes the
paradigm for adult negotiations through broader social spaces within dominant
culture.
1
Introduction:
Wonder Boys: Tales of the Extraordinarily Queer Adolescent in American Culture
This project explores how different novelists and filmmakers situate
fantasies of the queer adolescent through particular culturally constructed spaces of
home. Central to my analysis is the figure of the "Wonder Boy." Memoirs and
narratives of queer adolescence tend to construct the central subject as "extra-
ordinary" to use Biddy Martin's term. In these works the central characters'
difference is articulated via non-normative physical traits, cross-gender
characteristics (the inversion trope), deviant behaviors--the mother's boy, etc. The
queer child is often described as a genius, gifted, and therefore perceptive to the
ways in which he is culturally read and to the ways in which his childhood is
different from a "normative" one. Through the works of Truman Capote, John
Rechy, Paul Monette, and the Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy, I explore
varying processes of inscription through a series of narratives that allow for a
rethinking and re-articulation of the relationship between spatial configurations of
home and the formation and performance of queer identity. The selection of texts is
not meant to be all inclusive in so much as the choice of texts reflects my own
processes of identification and dis-identification. And, of course, such processes
inevitably reflect and respond to ongoing political and social debates within gay
and lesbian identity politics.
2
“Home" is the place in which boundaries are configured in terms of a
child’s relationships to rooms, to occupants of those rooms, and to the rules
prescribed for behavior in them. As Judith Butler has observed, “home” is the site
of indoctrination into the “heterosexual matrix.” With home as a site of “mandatory
and compulsory” heterosexuality within these narratives, the figuration of the
child's relationship to rooms also becomes the paradigm for adult negotiations
through broader social spaces within dominant culture. These narratives situate
childhood as the primary space through which these other broader spaces are
constructed. For example, Paul Monette’s coming of age narrative Becoming a
Man and his AIDS memoir Borrowed Time reveal cultural anxieties of boundary
maintenance between the interior spaces of home and the outside world. The young
Monette’s sexuality is actualized "outside the home." Consequently, this life
outside the home threatens to disrupt heteronormative conceptions of home. In the
latter work, which chronicles his adult life, "home" provides a sanctuary from the
menacing world of bacteria and homophobia. But once again guilt, associated with
his sexual activities "outside the home," threatens to disrupt the sanctity of home
via the intrusion of HIV and diseases associated with AIDS.
The question arises as to how representations of queer adolescence, or any
representations of difference for that matter, avoid reinscribing hegemonic
depictions of the other. The same may be said of queer narratives that repeatedly
construct the queer child as outside the norm, yet longing to be inside. Narratives of
queer adolescence often repeat the same traits (being bad at sports, being bookish,
3
being overly sensitive), and relationships to spatial configurations (the closet, the
home, the city) which have become common place tropes of recognition within the
genre of the coming out narrative. Given historical and cultural discontinuities
between queer communities, and the differences in so-called "individual"
experiences, it becomes impossible to define a single model of "wonder boy."
Nevertheless, the frequency of these recurring traits within particular
autobiographical works and broader cultural representations demands analysis. As
Elspeth Probyn writes, "how are we to theorize the singularity of queer uses of
childhood when the memories read like quantitative social science?" (453).
Similarly, Margaret Reynolds comments on this commonality of experience: "[it]
creates its own narrative, but it is a narrative that always covers the same ground,
and it is a narrative which becomes an exchange of calling cards within a gay
community" (xxvi). These narratives then invoke a politics of sameness, not only
within a homosexual community in terms of shared experiences but also in
relationship to a heterosexual framework in that many narratives try to construct
the homosexual as good, productive citizens within the dominant order.
The primary works I examine often blur distinctions between autobiography
and fiction in the act of constructing these wondrous figures that transcend the
normative conceptions of home. It may be argued that the impulses to engage with
representations of home in these narratives and to articulate a moment of difference
from that environment are no different from those in straight narratives, or for that
matter all narrative. There are nostalgic accounts of childhood from a heterosexual
4
perspective that do the same--even ones that construct the straight writer as a quasi-
queer child intellectual. But in many straight male narratives by such authors as
Tobias Wolf and Saul Bellow, the hero must differentiate himself from the
domestic sphere, only to become initiated into normative heterosexuality. The
narrative's trajectory becomes one of mastering various spatial configurations both
within and without the home.
But what happens when this choice is not available to the queer adolescent?
What other spaces must he master instead--if indeed he must master any? In
contrast to straight narratives, for the queer narrative home not only represents a
confining space, it also represents a regime of compulsive and compulsory
heterosexuality. Consequently, these narratives depict an adversarial relationship to
standardized conceptions of home and family. This is often displayed via a
conscious manipulation of the spatial boundaries and configurations that signify the
space of home and adolescence. An example is Siegfried and Roy's 3-D IMAX
film The Magic Box in which the dark confining spaces and oppressive masculinity
associated with their childhood homes in Germany are redefined and "mastered" in
their stage performances. Space is not confining but malleable as evidenced by the
repeated images of exploding boxes and acts of disappearance and reappearance. In
line with this analysis, the first chapter begins with a search for home in Truman
Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and culminates with the violent destruction of
home in Capote’s In Cold Blood.
5
While I may seem reductive in adhering to an articulation of an
inside/outside binary, my intention is to move away from such an analysis through
incorporating issues of class, race, ethnicity, location, and gender in my analysis. I
do not want to generalize or impose a single trajectory or model of queer childhood
and adolescence onto these narratives. I believe an emphasis on the differing
spatial configurations of home in specific works allows one to look beyond binary
oppositions. Additionally, I am trying to show how the texts break normative
accounts of the typographies of home, and how this allows for a transgressing of
boundaries. Hence, the mapping or chronicling of movement, while central to all
narratives, is of increased importance in constructing narratives of queer
adolescence. My second chapter discusses how conceptions of home, or perhaps
more appropriately the metaphor of home and the regulation of behavior, inform
conceptions of the city and even the nation/state or what might be labeled as
“geographies of exclusion” and how the “wonder boy” negotiates these regulations
of space as they are extended outside the home. For example, in Rechy's novel the
central character chronicles his movements from city to city as he crisscrosses the
United States. As he moves from location to location there are continual shifts in
his insider/outsider status. This movement underscores the exploration of identity
in the novel. Issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender performance all
converge, complicate, and question the central character's processes of
identification and even conceptions of home and national identity. If urban
masterplans are said to separate the feminine world of the suburbs from the
6
masculine world of the city and " architecture's bounding surfaces reconsolidate
cultural gender differences by monitoring the flow of people and the distribution of
objects in space," (Sanders 162) then Rechy’s narrative presents a re-appropriation
of those spaces and disruption of normative alignments of sex, gender, and
sexuality.
In emphasizing representations of home I also examine the dynamic
between depictions of the gay male body and constructions of home. Truman
Capote’s novels, particularly Other Voices, Other Rooms and In Cold Blood, and
his public persona as observed in numerous interviews on the “family” television in
the seventies are positioned not necessarily against but at least relationally to this
invisibility and the sanctity of traditional conceptions of home and family. The
question arises as to whether or not the gay male body has an increased presence
and heightened signification, especially given what some theorists have labeled a
postmodern loss of the stable organic body (at least for the straight-identified male
subject). Capote, Rechy and Monette play with the dichotomies of
absence/presence, visible/invisible in relation to gay identity and the gay male
body. The loss of bodily presence and cultural invisibility would seem to be issues
associated with gay identity and not with the straight-identified male subject.
However, theorists such as Lee Edelman have argued, via Foucault and others, that
the queer subject is rendered an increased visibility at first for the purposes of
identifying and containing the spread of that which is deemed “abnormal.” The
body is often depicted in excess of the spatial organizations in the works under
7
consideration. For example, in Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms the young
Joel's burgeoning sexuality is associated with the disintegration of the house he
inhabits, a Southern gothic manor as always already a sort of excessive queer space
that is representative of non-normative conceptions of home and sex/gender
alignments. While the novel might be read as an account of learning to accept one’s
outsider status, if viewed in conjunction with the public spectacle of Capote as the
precocious wise-child and later the grotesque man-child as seen in the media
photos and television interviews in the seventies, the figure of the “wonder boy”
agitates and questions normative conceptions of home and sex/gender alignments.
However, as the depictions of Capote reveal the tension between spectacle and
invisibility is difficult to negotiate.
The relationship between bodily depictions and spatial configurations in
these works evokes Leo Bersani's call to rethink the ways in which our bodies are
culturally mapped, and in particular how their boundaries are drawn (Homos 42-6).
Judith Butler's work is also helpful in exploring how the queer body is culturally
mapped and configured through her concern with what gets left out in the process
of constructing, discursively, "bodies that matter." What gets left out still haunts the
discursive process that renders particular bodies visible. My project looks at how
maintaining an "extraordinary" position that hovers both inside and outside the
dominant order works in relation to depictions of male youth within the novels and
films. Perhaps, the equation of identity with movements into and from domestics
8
spaces suggests a haunting of that space--a spectral absence/presence to gay
identity, one in which it is figured as both deviant and extraordinary.
9
Chapter 1
Burning Down the House:
Truman Capote and the Politics of Home
Most contemporary criticisms of Capote view him and his work as relics of
a time in which optimistic depictions of gay characters were, for the most part,
unimaginable. Moreover, Capote’s so-called stardom has often overshadowed his
work, with his often self-conscious promotion of his hedonistic lifestyle and his
friendships with the famous and fashionably elite. The mythic link between
dissipation and literary distinction often comes with the caveat that the true artist
must reject fame for its own sake: “The true artist’s fate [is] callous rejection (as in
Hawthorne’s ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’), posthumous acclaim (Melville and
Poe), the dissipation of creative energies (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller), self-
destruction (Poe, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Hemingway, Kerouac)” (Galloway 143).
While much of the contemporary criticism of Capote positions him in relation to
the pitfalls of genius that Galloway cites, his conspicuous courting of celebrity is
often seen as a sign of his lack of seriousness as a writer.
But is it Capote’s knack for self-promotion, arguably a trait possessed by
many “great” writers—Shakespeare, say, and certainly Ben Johnson, or his playful
“queerness” so central to his public identity that actually led to such questions
about his seriousness. In other words, the question of Capote’s seriousness and
10
authority has everything to do with the question of his homosexuality and its
display within a literary culture that traditionally erases the signs and significance
of that specific dissipation from the canon. For critics contemporary to Capote, he
was perhaps too queer, and for post-Stonewall critics he is never queer enough. In
this way readings of early Capote often play to a tension between spectacle and
invisibility that Lee Edelman would say calls on the assumptions of heterosexist
ideology that
throughout the twentieth century has insisted on the necessity of
“reading” the body as a signifier of sexual orientation.
Heterosexuality has thus been able to reinforce the status of its own
authority as “natural” (i.e., unmarked authentic, and non-
representational) by defining the straight body against the “threat” of
an “unnatural” homosexuality—a “threat” the more effectively
mobilized by generating concern about homosexuality’s unnerving
(and strategically manipulable) capacity to “pass,” to remain
invisible, in order to call into being a variety of disciplinary
“knowledges” through which homosexuality might be recognized,
exposed, and ultimately rendered, more ominously, invisible once
more (Edelmen 4).
1
However, Edelman also notes that the “invisibility” or what some have called
containment is never complete and that the process of identifying the homosexual
also constitutes and produces the very subject society wishes to erase. Within the
11
literary culture of Capote’s time, literary greatness demanded an invisibility or
containment that Capote’s very public persona exceeded. Nevertheless, Capote
desired literary greatness, and we can see his work not entirely as an attempt to
make homosexuality visible, but as a way to transform queer excess into literary
greatness by rendering the spectacle and signs of “homosexuality” as an
extraordinary marker of both artistic freakishness and grace.
The Publicity surrounding Capote’s famous photograph on the dust jacket
of Other Voices, Other Rooms plays to this tension between spectacle and
invisibility. Is the blond man-child in the photo a version of the angelic protagonist
of the novel? The photograph depicts a young Capote lying in repose, gazing
intently into the camera lens with both hands strategically positioned to foreground
the crotch. At the time, Capote claimed that the photographer, Harold Halma,
caught him off guard, but in fact Capote was responsible for posing himself in the
photograph and initiating the publicity surrounding the publication of his first
novel. Capote’s suggestion that the photographer caught him in a natural state and
the subsequent revelation that he posed the shot himself point to a thematic tension
throughout the novel—the semiotics involved in the position of Capote’s hand
involves a simultaneous covering and uncovering of his desire and thus, ultimately,
his homosexuality. Like the novel Other Voices which ends with Joel, the main
protagonist, at a point of transition, poised on the brink of possibilities, the
photograph teases the viewer with a promise of liberation that is continually
deferred. The difficulty Capote faces in his authorial debut is to construct an artistic
12
identity and characters that exceed the parameters of the hegemony while allowing
him to position his work within a literary framework. However, the trope of the
provocative and precocious child—from both the novel and the famous picture—
haunts the reception and the thematics of Capote’s work from this time onward.
Indeed the initial haze of publicity at Capote’s debut at the age of 24 often
defined him, because of his diminutive size, as wonder boy, the child genius. By
41, when he published In Cold Blood, Capote's work and public persona had long
come to invoke a tension between child and man, youth and aging, in particular
relationship to Capote’s queerness. In studying this tension between child and man
throughout a certain arc of Capote’s career, I juxtapose the early poetic wunderkind
Capote against the “aging” later day Capote who “revived” his career by
incorporating new journalism realistic techniques into In Cold Blood. As much as
categories of youth and aging can inform authorial reception, particularly with the
marketing of the precociousness of the debut novelist, Capote’s work and persona
often work off this figure of the child as a sign of ultimate potential. For Capote,
childhood and the site of home invoke both the gifted child and the grotesque, the
aging queer who is nonetheless read as a child/man. In focusing on Capote’s work
and reception in this first chapter, I am interested in exploring larger questions of
how dominant culture uses patterns of recognition to inform and engage with
conceptions of homosexuality at the axis of the youth/age, the
ordinary/extraordinary and the home and the road.
If the reception of Capote’s work often involved discussions of Capote’s
own life and his personal identifications—including his “queerness,” Capote, as
suggested earlier, often encouraged such readings. Through his interviews, as well
13
as through other autobiographical writings, Capote often promoted the “genius” of
his work (“I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius”)
2
,
and helped to create an image of his tragic “wunderkind” childhood as a framework
for this genius. Capote's work and life, then, present a site for examining the
interactions between articulating a queer identity and conceptualizing home and
family through a return to the site of childhood as both extraordinary and violent.
In his earlier works like his coming of age narrative Other Voices, Other
Rooms, Capote himself invokes larger cultural patterns for representing queer
adolescence: the overly sensitive and highly intelligent child, gender inversion
tropes, and the view of homosexuality as a state of arrested psychological
development. These representational strategies often equate homosexuality with
child-like qualities. If certain tropes of arrested development have informed
cultural assumptions of homosexuality, Capote seems to turn this static trope of
arrested development into a site of wondrousness. The significance of these tropes
is dependent on the extent to which they exceed conventional boundaries of race,
class, sex-gender systems, and even how they depict intelligence. Capote’s own
extraordinariness or “wondrousness”, as well as that of a number of characters in
his works, becomes conflated with his sexuality. But within Capote’s specific
oeuvre, this extraordinariness is particularly reliant on exceeding the narrative
confines of “home.”
If home is a site that Capote returns to repeatedly in his early and middle
career, Capote’s work cannot simply be read within the traditions of the
bildungsroman with its dual emphasis on heterosexual performance and
progression from innocence to maturity, a movement away from the childhood
domestic sphere. However, it would be easy to see the arc of his career in terms of
14
such a linear progression. In his early highly poetic narratives like Other Voices,
Other Rooms, Capote reveals queer identity through a search for home, as a desire
to exceed either innocence or experience, through the perpetuation of imaginative
possibility both wondrous and freakish. This theme extends through a number of
his works culminating with In Cold Blood, which enacts the violent destruction of
the heterosexual home. As a “mature” work based on a notorious crime in Kansas,
In Cold Blood, with its quasi-realistic mode, not only violates the domain of the
normative heterosexual home, but also does violence to his earlier gothic stylistics,
criticized for its emphasis on style over substance.
However, as opposed to reading In Cold Blood as a mature progression
from Other Voices and from an occluded queer subtext, I am interested in how this
later work, while seemingly overcoming the “queer” stylistics and subject matter,
nevertheless has an involved and complicated relationship to “objectivity” and
childhood, similar to narrative configurations in Other Voices. Moreover, I am
interested in the versions of queerness that are read into both works. In In Cold
Blood, Capote overlaps depictions of the childhoods of murderers and victims,
creating odd sympathies for the reader and odd connections between the innocent
and the criminal, the ordinary and perverse. Even in this depiction of a brutal
murder, childhood remains an imaginative possibility—as the narrator describes
childhood events of the murderers childhoods as if he were present during these
scenes, blurring the line between reportage and fiction. And in promoting himself
as New Journalism’s founder (as opposed to Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer),
Capote brags about his wondrous abilities of perfect recall, allowing him to
transcribe interviews verbatim without the use of notes or recording instruments,
creating not only a new style of reportage but a new type of literature. So even in
15
assuming the role of an objective reporter, Capote relies on a perfected subjective
instrument—his own memory—which allows him full access to the lives of the
Clutter family and their murderers; but Capote also claims to have full and
uncorrupted access to entire scenes from his own childhood as well. In other
words, childhood is simultaneously presented as a loss and a continuous present
through the extraordinary recall powers of the genius writer and the “queer.”
Through recollection—a theme linking Capote to Proust—the homosexual and
genius can embody both positions of child and man, and remain precocious even in
middle age. In playing with such tropes of innocence versus maturity though
figurations of the child/man, Capote not only creates childhood identity as a point
of nostalgia but allows it to occupy a simultaneous present in much of his work. In
other words, the past is a version of the present, and the present always has the
potential for queer inversions. Rather than figuring childhood to adulthood as a
linear progression with a clear timeline, both Capote’s Other Voices and In Cold
Blood produce an adjacency where one can go back and forth, an
architectural/spatial configuration of the past and present through the site of the
home, as a series of adjoining rooms and spaces that accumulate “queer” and
“straight” scenes and fantasies of the family.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
In Other Voices, Capote positions the central protagonist, the twelve-year-
old Joel Knox, outside normative conventions of home and family. He is literally
and metaphorically in transition as he is moving from New Orleans to the small
Louisiana town of Noon City--an inversion of the bildungsroman’s more typical
trajectory of a movement to the big city.
3
As the narrative reveals, Joel’s mother
16
has died and he has gone to live with his aunt and numerous cousins. Here Joel
senses he is out of place. Intellectually he finds himself superior to his relations,
and upon the receipt of a letter he presumes to be from his father (it is later revealed
to be written by Randolph--a one-time friend of his father and cousin to Joel’s
stepmother), Joel goes to live with his father at Skully’s Landing outside Noon
City. The father, it turns out, is paralyzed both physically and mentally. The
narrative trajectory then becomes a movement away from a defined social order as
the city to a decaying, unfixed gothic manor—a fixture in the gothic tradition as a
site for the bizarre and the eccentric--as always already representative of a
breakdown in the social order. If one looks at Joel’s coming of age as contingent
on his awareness of his homosexuality, the novel can be viewed as a narrative in
which the protagonist learns to accept an outsider position in society, an integration
of sorts.
Formal criticism of Other Voices, Other Rooms often overlooks Capote’s
extensive experimentations with narrative conventions, and instead emphasizes that
his characters lack development. Moreover, many contemporary critiques of
Capote emphasize the excessive gothic stylization over substance of the work;
however, we can look at the subtext of these formal critiques as ones leveled
against the text’s queerness, at a time when tropes of homosexuality were often
associated with arrested development. Unlike the traditional male bildungsroman
where the clearly defined plot is particularly concerned with presenting the
protagonist’s development and progression within a heterosexual framework, the
17
trajectory of Joel’s personal development does not correspond to successful
ascension within a heteronormative social order. At the time the novel was
published a New York Times book reviewer underscored this perceived lack of
development in the central character:
One of the reasons that the many striking elements of Mr. Capote’s
novel do not fuse into a successful whole is that Joel himself is so
vague a person and it is through Joel’s eyes that the story is told.
Joel was subject to hallucinations and curious dreams. In the course
of the summer and after some very queer experiences indeed Joel is
supposed to have crossed the invisible line dividing childhood from
the first manifestations of maturity. But Joel’s psychological growth
is not clear enough to be convincing because Joel himself is never a
flesh-and-blood boy. (Prescott)
The same perspective is revealed in the book review section of the New Yorker for
the same week in January 1948: “[Capote] can rescue himself by discovering and
carefully constructing an adult-level story that really needs telling” (Baker).
Capote’s rejection of the realistic mode often associated with the bildungsroman
and replacing it with a more experimental mode might be read in line with this
resistance to the conventions of the bildungsroman in terms of identity and
classification:
Like a surprising number of our younger novelists, he is not
interested in narrative clarity and what used to be called realism.
18
Reality for Capote is not material and specific; it is emotional,
poetic, symbolical, filled with sibilant whispering and enigmatic
verbal mysteries. (Prescott 1948).
Despite some positive reviews, many critics imply that Capote’s prose is “purple,”
and that the book lacks a certain depth or maturity. In essence the book and Capote
himself are read as esoteric and undeveloped. Similarly, the media coverage of
Capote reflects a tendency to equate an arrested development with homosexuality:
the narratives surrounding Capote continually emphasize his elfin body and whiny,
child-like quality of voice (Malin 59). While Capote was always openly
homosexual, his homosexuality often went unacknowledged or was subsumed by a
series of tropes that continually constructed him as child-like.
As a forerunner of the coming out narrative, Capote’s first novel raises the
question as to what happens when the “normative ascension” from childhood to
adolescence to more authoritative adulthood is no longer an option. In this sense,
his first novel Other Voices is less a coming-out tale per se—in which the
protagonist comes to a definite conclusion that he is a homosexual, but rather it is a
tale obsessed with the fascinating markers and signs of queerness—the strange
diction and idiom, the gestures and paraphernalia, the wallpaper and rooms that
inhabit and surround the protagonist and other characters. As the novel’s narrative
trajectory and title affirm, coming out means literally and figuratively being
relegated to “other rooms.” But what might be read as a site of containment in these
“other rooms” also becomes a site of extraordinary possibilities for the protagonist
19
in Capote’s work. In order to construct a queer identity, Capote subverts the
conventions of the normative coming of age narrative particularly the plot
trajectory from childhood to adulthood by continually juxtaposing the child against
the man in various guises.
Specifically in Other Voices this is played out through the juxtaposing of
the adolescent character of Joel with the adult character of Randolph and the loss of
boundaries between the two. The characters can be seen as different versions of one
another, though not in a father/son matrix, as Randolph is portrayed as almost as
much of a precocious child-man as Joel, and as much Joel’s peer than any guardian.
Randolph speaks to Joel in a wry sophisticated manner as if Joel were older.
Moreover, they are described as physically similar. In some sense Joel can be seen
as an imperfect memory of Randolph’s youth conjured up within the confines of
the decaying mansion.
While post-Romantic cultural narratives of childhood repeatedly construct
that site as one of sexual innocence and even invoke nostalgia for that innocence,
queer narratives repeatedly question this conflation of childhood with sexual
innocence. The effect of conflating the characters of Randolph and Joel is one of
stasis or a perpetual state of transition (from one version to another) from
innocence to experience and vice versa. With the absence of normative
developmental system, any specific moral imperative--against the threat of
unnatural vices, for instance--is in doubt. Configurations of adulthood are tempered
with childhood, and Capote makes no attempt to hold adults to account for their
20
“immaturity.” Randolph dresses up and playacts. (Randolph looks are also
described as youthful.) Even as it might seem that Randolph wants to possess
Joel’s supposed “innocence” for himself, he presents an intricate and sophisticated
surface for Joel to interpret—somewhat like a gothic villain. At the same time,
Randolph finds sympathy in Joel’s precocious intelligence as much as his angelic
looks, for it is partially Randolph’s own exceptional inventiveness and intelligence
that keep Joel fascinated.
As a character, Joel possesses the potential to mirror Randolph, provide
recognition and acknowledgements of gifts that would otherwise be lost within the
mire of the Skully’s Landing. Moreover, Randolph is the only adult that can really
best Joel in wits; as a result, Joel takes Randolph seriously. Although Randolph
possesses a knowing urbanity, he becomes an extension of the decaying home, with
its elaborate furniture and odd memories and souvenirs, its queer narrative excess.
And even as Randolph manipulates Joel into remaining at Skully’s Landing,
Randolph is less of a villain than a potential version of Joel’s queer future. There is
a certain amount of sympathy in terms of their desires and intellect—their artistic
gifts and effeminacy. Joel’s extreme intelligence (linked somehow to his sexuality)
makes it impossible for him to remain innocent, and actually binds him to
Randolph in his uniqueness. Randolph’s desire for Joel’s youth also represents
Joel’s own nostalgia for earlier versions of himself, even at young the age of
twelve. Hence, in Capote’s world, the search for innocence is perpetual, not
limited to a specific age. Here it might be said that the act of reconstructing a queer
21
childhood is predicated on a loss--in the sense of a loss of a normative childhood
that Randolph and Joel share.
4
Joel, despite his youth, is never quite Randolph’s
dupe, with his relentless investigations into the rooms of the house, and Joel’s
eventual realization of Randolph’s weaknesses—his hopeless loves and his
agoraphobia. Outside the confines of the mansion, Randolph—a man in his
thirties— is no more than a child, tripping over himself, and needing to be lead,
whereas Joel recognizes his own charm and its use in the world. Here Capote
seems to be questioning how authority and seriousness are appointed to and by
homosexuals along the axis of youth and age, privileging youth—at times—and
particularly youthful looks, over maturity. At the same time, Capote examines the
potential of friendship, sympathy and intimacy across generational boundaries, not
patterned by a father/son paradigm.
For Joel the dominance of the heterosexual framework initially renders the
homosexual view as vague and somewhat unintelligible as an array of fascinating
but mysterious gestures. Joel describes Randolph as saying things in a “funny way”
and that Randolph seemed always to be carrying on in an, excessive “unfathomable
vocabulary secret dialogues with someone unknown.” Randolph’s assertion is that
“all difficult music must be heard more than once” (143). Here Randolph is
representative of the “other voices” that Joel must learn to decode, a knowledge
tied to an awareness of his sexuality. However, the imposition of heterosexist views
on homosexuality necessarily complicates this awareness—despite Joel’s
extraordinary abilities. Following a scene in which Randolph tells Joel the house is
22
sinking at a rate of four inches a year, Joel has a dream about the now dilapidated
Cloud Hotel which was once a destination for honeymooners and says “this was the
place folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were
not dead” (123). To be a homosexual then is to be among the living dead, as
Randolph reveals when he states that he was “born dead” (143). The physical
disintegration of the architectural structures of the house and the Cloud Hotel
(which also functions as a home for a man named Sunshine, another queer-coded
character in the novel)
5
have symbolic importance in that they are fundamental for
what Kaja Silverman calls the dominant fiction—the images and stories through
which a society figures consensus (Silverman 30).
If Capote is attempting to show what it is like to live as a homosexual, he
simultaneously perpetuates a need for homosexuals to be policed and to accept
their place in society among the “other rooms,” as Randolph seems to do. Policing
in terms of Capote’s novel can be inscribed using D.A. Miller’s theoretical
paradigms for Victorian detective novels, where he suggests “our attention needs to
turn from the discipline narrated in the novel to the discipline inherent in the
novel’s technique of narration” (Miller 52). In the first half of the novel, Capote
presents the reader with a series of images without an interpretive function
relegated to Joel as the narrator. However, for the reader everything is continually
referred to as queer and we are asked to become agents of the metropolis, who wait
for Joel to detect and accept this ‘queerness’ in himself—this discovery (and
acceptance) on Joel’s part being one part (and only one) of the novel’s narrative
23
propulsion and resolution. But, as Miller contends, “discourse on power must
finally be taken as a discourse of power—a discourse spoken through by a power
that is simply extending its binding strategy of displacement” (57). Consequently,
Capote’s explication of growing up queer in the South, while pointing to the
devalued status of the homosexual, simultaneously reaffirms that status through
Joel’s ultimate acceptance of his role as an “outsider.” The positioning of Joel as an
“outsider” is of course supported by his geographical location, outside the big city,
outside Noon City, and in a decaying antebellum mansion. In this sense, Randolph
also becomes part of the policing mechanism, even as he leads Joel into possibility
of marvelous ruins and rooms that store bizarre objects and recollections. If the
traditional migration of the homosexual to the anonymity of the city is inverted, it
works to doubly affirm Joel’s outsider status, as well as his peculiar giftedness.
As suggested earlier, in OVOR queer subjectivity becomes linked with
narrative excess. To this end, Capote borrows from the conventions of the female
melodrama. Melodramatic narratives are characterized by an excess of
undischarged emotion which cannot be accommodated by the action and which is
traditionally expressed through the music or mise-en-scene. Excess is displaced
onto the body and literally onto the walls of the room as seen in the depiction of
Randolph in his kimono and the collection of antique dolls in his room. Strangely
enough, the dolls are used as icons of disembodiment, as well as the artifacts of
childhood, ghostly souvenirs expelling their own innards. The dolls’ costumes
themselves become excess, literally, for they cover nothing:
24
some were missing arms, legs, some without heads, other whose
bead-eyes stared glass-blank through their innards, straw and
sawdust, showed through open wounds; all, however, were
costumed, and exquisitely, in a variety of velvet, lace, linen (141-2).
Capote directs the reader’s eye first to the metonymic display of bodies and then to
the costuming—marking a tension between both absence and presence. The reader
is given the illusion of seeing through the costuming to its underlying construction,
just as in one instance Joel catches a glimpse beneath Randolph’s kimono of the
large expanse of flesh which was his thigh. Is Randolph a man or a doll, a man or a
child? The dissolution of the body in this scene again has the potential to disrupt
the processes of inscription and codification that are endemic to heterosexist
ideology.
In disrupting these processes of inscription Capote mixes plot devices
familiar to several genres: coming of age narratives/the bildungsroman and
melodrama. Melodrama’s social determinant involves the representation of power
relations, particularly (in the woman’s film) the relationship of a female protagonist
to some manifestation of the patriarchal social order (a husband/father figure, the
bourgeois family/ home ideal, or the range of social conventions which shape and
control a woman’s identity and agency). In the case of Capote’s novel it is the
relationship between Joel and his father. Typical of the bildungsroman, the growing
child is often orphaned or at least fatherless, like David Copperfield, Pip, etc. “The
loss of the father, either by death or by alienation, usually symbolizes or parallels a
25
loss of faith in the values of the hero’s home and family and leads to the search for
a substitute parent or creed” (Buckley 19). The role of the father in OVOR is central
in much of the criticism of the novel. Writing four years after the novel’s
publication, one critic writes that “once he has rejected his true father as unreal,
Joel is left with no alternative but to accept Randolph, and through him
homosexuality as real” (Aldridge 40). Although Joel’s father is physically disabled,
nonetheless, his presence haunts, simultaneously disrupting and consolidating
Joel’s sense of self. As such, Joel’s relationship with his father and Randolph are
representative of his conflict with masculinity.
When Joel finally meets his father, Mr. Sansom, the latter’s paralysis does
render him absent, but his presence is kept alive in Joel’s mind. In another
metonymic display emphasizing the immateriality of the physical body, Joel’s
father is reduced to a pair of eyes: “his eyes, like windows in summer, were seldom
shut, always open and staring, even in sleep” (129). But the eyes would seem to be
ineffectual for Joel describes the eyes as “teary grey with a dumb glitter.” Yet, the
imposition of heterosexual views implicit in this paternal gaze is very real for Joel:
“he was half-convinced Mr. Sansom’s eyes knew exactly what went on inside his
head, and he attempted for this reason, to keep his thoughts channeled in
impersonal directions” (175). In this policing economy there is little time for self-
reflection, and thus for any exploration of one’s desires, particularly if they are
homosexual desires. The continual threat of surveillance and possible discovery
26
even cause Joel to view Randolph as a “messenger for a pair of telescopic eyes”
(201) after Joel runs away to the traveling show with Idabel.
Joel has also been on the other side of surveillance in relationship to the site
of the home. In New Orleans, as a member of a secret neighborhood club, he
participated in a peeping-tom game called blackmail, “the idea being to approach a
strange house and peer invisibly through its window” (69). It is during one of these
games that Joel saw two men kissing each other in an “ugly” little room. Is it the
physical room itself or the act occurring within that makes the room ugly for Joel?
Typically in the bildungsroman the city plays a double role as both agent of
liberation and a source of corruption (Buckley). In OVOR the place and the act are
syntactically linked and representative of a societal view and framework which
seemingly governs Joel’s response. The site of potential liberation simultaneously
becomes a site of increased surveillance.
The figures of consensus are so heightened in the novel that Joel’s
acceptance of his “place” in society reads more as a response to the effects of
policing within the novel than a resistance to it. For Joel, this relation is associated
with a return to the home or the security of domestic space, despite his own first-
hand knowledge that such domestic spaces can be infiltrated. At the end of Part II,
Joel realizes that “He had a room, he had a bed” (204). His movement toward his
room becomes an attempt to “appease that other fury, the nameless one...,” (203)
and a metaphorical acceptance of his homosexual identity, but the actions are not
necessarily self-fulfilling.
27
Despite the awkward security of his room, Joel feels “without identity”
because his appearance and behavior, as we have seen through the eyes of the other
characters, do not fall in line with traditional divisions between male and female.
He must, after all, sometimes leave his room. While searching for the ruins of The
Cloud Hotel, Joel and Idabel come to a creek which must be crossed on a wooden
beam. When he is half way over Joel begins to feel incapable of ever reaching the
other side and believes he will always be “suspended between land, and in the dark
and alone” (100). The key to crossing the bridge would be to perform within the
established boundaries of the heteronormative matrix, but as the repeated imagery
in the novel indicates, this boy, this place, these people are in stasis always midway
between polarities. Seemingly there is no space in which queer identity can be
explored and there is no way to maneuver outside the heterosexual economy which
“is constantly policing its boundaries against an invasion of queerness” (Butler
126). Hence, here is the importance of Capote locating “home” outside this
economy as much as possible, even if only symbolically.
Nearly thirty-five years after Other Voices, Other Rooms was published
Capote formally acknowledges the task of removing disguises that he began in
OVOR. Capote writes in the introduction to Music for Chameleons that his
intentions were to “remove disguises, not manufacture them” (xvi). In order to
remove disguises, Capote attempts to deconstruct the male/female binary that is so
tightly linked with identity in Western thought and practice, and closely aligned
with the development of the male protagonist within the bildungsroman, by
28
creating characters in Other Voices that destabilize gender divisions both socially
and biologically; thus by extension these characters potentially destabilize all
categories of identity. For example, at the moment the novel begins, Joel is
“without identity” (42). We can discern from the people he comes in contact with
on his journey to Skully’s Landing--particularly the truck driver and Idabel, the
resident tomboy--that he does not obtain as “male” in heterosexual terms. Joel’s
eyes are described as having a “girlish tenderness” (6). Similarly, presumed gender
contradictions abound in the characters that surround him: Amy, who is married to
his father, is described as having a “vague description of a mustache fuzzying her
upper lip” (28). Randolph, Amy’s cousin, has “wide-set womanly eyes,” (84), and
his mother, Angela Lee, grew a beard while on her deathbed.
Prior to the publication of his 1948 novel Other Voices, Other Rooms
theories of gender inversion had been explored by many other writers. Most
specifically, Djuna Barnes in Nightwood conceives of gender identity as an “open-
ended range of possibilities rather than a strict choice between masculine and
feminine” (Harris 235). Capote’s novel, on the one hand, seems constructed to both
reaffirm the conflation of gender identity, biological sex, and sexual object choice
and, on the other hand, to agitate those categories through the use of gender
inversions. Just as Capote works within simultaneity of time—the presence in the
house of Randolph and Joel as two versions of each other across a youth/maturity
axis, Capote turns gender inversion into a form of gender simultaneity. Even as he
creates the embodiments of the “same” person across time/space (Joel the boy and
29
Randolph the man), he also projects male and female versions of the “same”
person—as with the identical twin pairs Idabel and Florabel, one feminine and one
masculine at constant war with one another. In one room, Randolph is an
effeminate man; in yet another (the same room seen from the outside window) he is
a woman. Indeed, the main acknowledgment that Joel makes to himself is not
simply figuring out that Randolph loves men and that Joel may be like Randolph
and hence feminine, but that the beckoning woman in the unidentifiable room that
Joel spies in the beginning of the novel is Randolph. That is, Joel must learn to
accept simultaneity—the same body as male and female— as well as progression.
Can the policing mechanism of the rooms keep these not so separate identities
apart? It is this simultaneity and doubling that perhaps leads to a sense of
dissolution and disembodiment in the novel. Can Joel be Randolph and still be
Joel? Can Randolph be a doll—another object in the room—and still be real?
The blurring of gender lines is most materially manifest in Randolph’s
various stages of cross-dressing. As Joel stands in the garden looking at the house
he has his first glimpse of the “queer lady,” whom he does not yet realize is
Randolph:
She was holding aside the curtain of the left corner window, and smiling
and nodding at him, as if in greeting or approval....but she was no one Joel had ever
known: the hazy substance of her face, the suffused marshmallow features, brought
to mind his own vaporish reflection in the wavy chamber mirror (71).
30
Potentially, if anatomy (or sex) is not seen as destiny, then gender need no
longer be conceived as equivalent to sex, in other words, femaleness does not
presuppose femininity (Harris 238). This allows the body to be cut loose from
culturally prescribed meanings, yet this freeing does not result in the return to a
precultural, natural, and non-gendered state. Once cut loose from these prescribed
meanings, newly generated meanings may be created for the body. Some of these
new inscriptions of gender are embodied in how Capote figures inversion as a
display of multiple versions. While it might seem that any liberatory potential is
undercut by repeatedly aligning Joel’s character with Randolph, the other
potentially gay male in the novel, the use of words such as “hazy, suffused, and
vaporish” in the above quotation depict a physical blurring and dissolution of the
gay character’s body. It seems that in Capote’s cosmology once one transgresses
hegemonic gender practices, one has no material body. To return to Lee Edelman
for a moment, Capote’s dissolution of the gay character’s body, suggests an attempt
to circumvent the heterosexist ideology that “insists on reading the body as a
signifier of sexual orientation.” However, what is interesting is that while
Randolph is always depicted as a feminized man, Joel does not recognize the other
Randolph--the queer lady—as Randolph, until the end. Joel’s ultimate epiphany
does not concern Randolph’s desire for men—which is revealed during an extended
monologue in the second part of novel—but the fact that at times Randolph
occupies an entirely different persona and/or body, both or neither of which may be
the “real” Randolph, rendering Randolph into a vapory ghost.
31
Marjorie Garber
6
shows how traditionally mainstream culture links
transvestism with homosexuality. The history of transvestiesm and the history of
homosexuality, she says, constantly intertwine, both willingly and unwillingly; but,
she argues that neither can be simply transhistorically decoded as a sign for the
other (131). The presence of transvestism within Other Voices, Other Rooms, in
view of Garber’s work, then has the potential effect of destabilizing all binaries: not
only male and female, but also gay and straight, sex and gender. If transvestism
offers a critique of the binary alignment of sex and gender, it is not because it
simply makes such distinctions reversible, but because it “denaturalizes,
destabilizes and defamiliarizes sex and gender signs” (Garber 147).
Garber also cites Severro Sarduy’s contention that transvestism itself is
spectacular and demands to be looked at; the coexistence of masculine and
feminine signifiers in one body, and not something beneath the mask (Garber 150).
We see the opposite of this occurring in the portrayal of Randolph, as evidenced by
the display of antique dolls in Randolph’s room where the dilapidated dolls are
again used as icons of disembodiment, as well as literal metaphors for gender
inversion. However, the description of the dolls also signifies an approach to
costuming which falls in line with a male tradition in writing. In her essay
“Costumes of the Mind” Sandra Gilbert argues that the male modernist writer sees
costuming as false, something which must be removed in order to “dis-cover” and
“re-cover” what we are—a naked truth seemingly underlies the costuming, while
female writers such as Woolf, Gilbert says, contend that we are what we wear.
32
Gilbert’s contentions point to a central paradox in Capote’s novel. While, in one
instance, we get a peek at Randolph’s naked and hairless thigh beneath his
costuming, just as we had a glimpse beneath the dolls’ costuming, it is also the
costuming with which we link Randolph’s identity. The kimono becomes a
signifier of his homosexual identity, as evidenced by the critics who view the novel
as Joel’s fall into homosexuality. For example, one critic writes, “{Randolph}
dresses in butterfly-sleeved kimonos ... wears ladies jewelry ...[and] At the end,
Joel even wants to look like Randolph” (Garson 19).
If Capote's intention is to unmask gender performativity, his attempt
underscores the difficulty of doing away with concepts of gender identity. Capote’s
figures of inversion as multiple versions, as has been argued of such figures in
general, rely to some extent on the gender binary at the same time they question
and attempt to undo it. In Other Voices, Other Rooms there are moments where
gender is often separated from biological sex offering a free-floating range of
possibilities. One is neither masculine nor feminine. One is both masculine and
feminine to varying degrees and in varying combinations. However, as the criticism
of the novel reflects, the tendency is to reinstate the binary by linking Randolph’s
behavior with homosexuality. On the other hand, criticisms from a gay studies
perspective have found the character of Randolph not gay enough: “...the adult gay
character, Cousin Randolph, speaks of his love for the prizefighter Pepe in a way
that can be considered as a generalized plea for human love as much as a statement
of specifically gay male feelings” (Chistensen 62).
33
The title of a more recent criticism of Capote’s work, “Truman Capote:
Homosexual or Transgender,” also reflects the pervasiveness of the gender binary
as well as the conflation of mental health with the degree to which one conforms to
gender norms particularly with the frequent pathologizing of gender identity
disorder in the nineteen eighties. The author contends that a review of the
biographical material of Truman Capote’s life reveals behavior “more indicative of
ego-dystonic transsexuality than the alcoholic homosexuality Capote himself
publicly proclaimed” (Seil 67). Interestingly, some theorists have suggested that
gender identity disorder is the apotheosis of postmodernism in that these children
pose an irresolvable conflict that destabilizes the binary categories of male and
female, and in so doing promotes a crisis of category itself (Korbett 116).
However, as Biddy Martin has written "[q]ueer deconstructions of
gender...cannot do all the earth shattering work they promise, because gender
identity is not the whole of psyhic life.” But that is not to say that those
deconstructions are therefore insignificant. She contends that perverse desires do
not seem very transformative if the claims made in their name rely on conceptions
of gender and psychic life as either so fluid as to be irrelevant or so fixed and
punitive that they have to be escaped (48). Capote's novels suggest that gender
identities are not such discrete categories. And it would seem that his return to
childhood and the point at which those divisions are instilled in the child, and here I
am refering to the semi-autobiographical mode from which he writes a number of
34
his novels, specifically OVOR, becomes a way in which gender binaries can be
transcended.
Basing the plot of a so-called lesbian or gay novel on the coming out of a
protagonist is still a popular way of narrating and representing homosexual life and
counterbalancing the oppressive compulsion of heteronormativity. However, one
becomes increasingly aware that
if it is already true that lesbians and gay men have been traditionally
designated as impossible identities, errors of classification, unnatural
disasters within juridico-medical discourses, or, what perhaps
amounts to the same, the very paradigm of what calls to be
classified, regulated, and controlled, then perhaps these sites of
disruption, error, confusion, and trouble can be the very rallying
points for a certain resistance to classification and to identity as
such. (Butler 19)
Perhaps it would have been better to start at the end of the novel and work
backwards. In the final lines of “Other Voices, Other Rooms, Joel turns and looks
back, symbolically, “at a boy he left behind” (127). A traditional reading might see
this as a quest novel about Joel’s growth from childhood to maturity. The growth is
achieved by learning, through a series of lessons, to accept a lifestyle for himself
and to reflect upon his former self and how far he has progressed. But at conflict
with this is the potential to conflate homosexuality with an arrested development in
the novel that thwarts such narrative trajectories. Some critics say the novel is
35
about Joel’s acceptance of his proper place. Some have even critiqued the book as
not gay enough: “although in tone and atmosphere this book may be regarded as
gay, in actual fact Capote avoids having the main character come to grips with the
problem by keeping his thirteen-year-old safely prepubescent” (Austen 114). But in
a world where everything is destabilized, like definitions of male and female,
where even the house itself is sinking, the story might be more about inscribing or
constructing an existence for oneself. While one could argue that Capote never
seems to get beyond defining a homosexual identity outside heterosexual terms;
and, perhaps, that is the only position from which Capote can write in 1948, the
novel itself with its manipulation of traditional narrative trajectories and
conventions of home suggests those definitions need to be defined outside
normative trajectories of time and space as they correlate to identity formation.
In the last scene, Joel’s going to meet the “queer lady,” (Randolph in drag)
who beckons him from the window, signifies his acceptance of the instability of
identity. The novel might seem to depict the initiation of a young man into society,
following the narrative trajectory established by the bildungsroman, but it is does
not. Instead, it might be better described as an initiation out of society, as evidence
by the continual progression of images moving from lightness to darkness
throughout the novel as Joel moves closer to an awareness of his homosexuality.
Early in the novel, when he first meets Randolph, Joel discerns a pattern of
circles in the composition of Randolph’s face (84). At the novel’s end, Joel’s
realization becomes an acceptance of a reaffirmation of societal views of
36
homosexuality. Seeing Randolph “outside and alone,” what else could he do “but
describe a circle, the zero of his nothingness” (231). In Other Voices, Other Rooms
the world Joel is asked to accept is a place where one achieves identity or non-
identity through resistance to and subsequent reinscription of the inherent binarism
of male/female identities in the heterosexual world. As D.A. Miller suggests,
“Desire can become at once the effect of the power one withstands and the cause of
its intensified operation” (Miller 27). The “outside and alone” which are equated
with nothingness in Randolph’s character refers to the difficulty in representing a
queer identity and the difficulty or even the impossibility of articulating such an
identity outside narrative conventions. Joel must literally grab Randolph’s coat tail
and “steer” him in the direction of the landing. For it is at the landing that Randolph
is most successful at inscribing an existence for himself despite the threat of
erosion and decay that the mansion represents to such an existence or perhaps
because of the erosion and decay of an oppressive system that the mansion
signifies.
In Cold Blood
Capote’s agreement in 1959 to write a series of articles for the New Yorker
about the investigation into the murder of a family in an obscure Kansas town, is
not so unusual given his growing interest in the non-fiction format which began
with his book The Muses are Heard. While Capote claimed to have invented the
genre of the nonfiction novel with the writing of In Cold Blood, (an assertion that
37
was highly contested) the choice of subject matter, the murder of a prosperous
American family, plays into the on going theme in Capote’s work of a search for
identity through a search for home as explored from the position of an outsider. If
childhood maintains a somewhat idealized position in Other Voices, in In Cold
Blood Capote’s exposure and critique of hegemonic culture seems intended to
remove the idealized fantasies that gloss over violence and brutality, particularly as
they pertain to the site of home within American culture. Near the end of the work
there is a line by one of the criminals, Perry Smith, which foregrounds Capote’s
critique of American culture and its systemic oppression of the outsider. Of the
Clutter family whom Smith and his accomplice Richard “Dick” Hickock murdered
he says “ [t]hey never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life.
Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it” (302).
While In Cold Blood may seem like an absolute departure from Capote’s
earlier style, critique of the work seem also to be based on its inability to succeed at
the “objectivity” that Capote’s claim for it. Indeed, Capote cannot escape from his
own extraliterary queer excess, nor perhaps would he want to. Against Capote’s
own claims of objectivity and perfect recall, a great emphasis was placed on
Capote’s personal identification with the criminals. Capote himself contributed
somewhat to such readings by bragging that he did not need to take notes or record
interviews—so perfect was his virtuoso memory. In other words by promoting his
reliance on “imperfect” journalistic techniques, Capote already called into question
his qualifications for objective reportage. And similar to earlier critiques of Other
38
Voices about lack of development, a number of critics have pointed to Capote’s
inability to provide enough sympathy for the victims or a rationale or motivation
for the murders. On the other hand, critics have said that Capote’s non-fiction
novel points to the randomness and irrationality of contemporary American life.
Part of the brilliance of the work and the failure of the work for others is that he
offers no succinct explanation for these criminals’ actions—despite Capote’s often
extensive depiction of their early life. For those who criticized Capote for not
presenting a full vision of American life, the focus of this criticism is on the
depiction of the members of the Clutter family. As one critic writes;
Mr. Capote no doubt wanted to admire these good people so much at
the center of American life. But they did not interest him, and they
come out therefore rather like soap-opera characters. His depiction
of them is not, like the depiction of the criminals, penetrated by his
intelligence. He fails in other words to fill out his vision of
American life, because he fails to be sufficiently ironical....
(Langbaum 118)
In other words, despite Capote’s claims for objectivity, he is criticized for being too
uninterested in the “protagonists” (the Clutters, the all American family, whom we
and the narrator should perhaps identify with) and yet not “ironical,” which also
requires a certain authorial distance. He is both too distant and not distant enough.
Capote was also criticized for lacking insight into the psychology of the crime.
Norman Mailer was particularly critical of Capote’s approach in this respect. He
39
argued that Capote made up his mind about Smith and Hickok and that ‘his killers
were doomed and directed to act in this fashion; there was no other possible
outcome’ (Plimpton 214-5). These criticisms, as well as the alignment of Capote’s
sympathies with the criminals, have much to do with the way Capote constructs the
narratives, but also in Capote’s own marketing of his extraordinary reportorial
skills.
Indeed, as the case itself was so notorious, public sympathy was already
with the Clutters—the normative American family. Capote turned the story into a
literary version of true crime. And, as one critic writes, the successful crime fiction
writer “turns crime stories into high literature by throwing the interest on the
murderer: our sympathy must be with him, our sympathy of comprehension not
approbation” (Langbaum 115). Capote also implies that Smith is the antithesis of
the American dream, the achievement of which the Clutter family embodies.
As such the novel becomes an account of the disenfranchised rather than
one of integration. To this end Capote narrativizes the criminals’ life stories in the
form of an anti-bildungsroman. By weaving together fragmented narratives about
their adult lives with those of their childhood, Capote constructs the inverse of the
novel of growth allowing the reader to see the child in the man, the man in the child
but without a sense of growth or development. The movement back and forth
between the adult Smith and Hickock and their childhoods creates a narrative that
is more circular than linear and one that is fraught with repetition. It continually
folds back on itself just as the road trip Smith and Hickock take to Mexico after
40
committing the murders returns them to Las Vegas and finally back to Holcomb,
Kansas where the murders were committed.
Childhood becomes a series of events that are perpetually present and
perpetually lost. In discussing Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, theorist
Peter Brooks discusses the complex phenomenon of repetition and return via the
works of Freud and Kierkegaard and shows how these concepts engage with
trajectories of progression and regression within the work:
Repetition in the text is a return, a calling back or a turning
back....repetitions are both returns to and returns of: for instance,
returns to origins and returns of the repressed, moving us forward in
Pip’s journey toward elucidation, disillusion, and maturity by taking
us back, as if in obsessive reminder that we cannot really move
ahead until we have understood that still enigmatic past, belongs to
the future. (125)
Rather than placing the reader in direct connection with a comforting, familiar past,
Capote’s narrative presents the reader with the randomness of events/life. Capote’s
narrative shifts back and forth between realistic modes that attempt to offer rational
explanations and postmodern narrative techniques that question the presumed
stability of identity and order: “But every illusion he’d ever had, well, they had all
evaporated, so on that night he was so full of self-hatred and self-pity that I think he
would have killed somebody ... You can’t go through life without getting anything
you want, ever” (211). Just as Capote constructs the Clutter family to epitomize the
41
success of the American dream, he uses Perry Smith represent the consequence for
one to whom this paradigm of success and achievement is not available.
While Smith’s alienation from this paradigm might offer a larger social
framework from which to view his criminal behavior, Capote plays with the
readers’ need to rationalize experience. The citizens of Holcomb, Kansas assumed
the murderers must have come from their own community, and that the murderers
somehow must have been connected to the victims. They are most shocked that the
Clutters, representative of the best of Holcolmb, can be taken down; their violent
murders make everyone unsafe in their own homes. Capote depicts many scenes of
characters looking out at the Clutter home and locking up their own homes. It also
contains many fantasies of homes that the townspeople have—including chief
detective Dewey’s dream of a farmhouse. Dewey, when he finally got confessions
from Smith and Hickock, felt disappointment; for “ the confessions...failed to
satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident,
virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by
lightning” (267). Similarly, Capote brings into question the killers’ perceptions of
each other. Dick sees Perry as“a natural killer” –absolutely sane but conscienceless
and capable of killing with or without motive. At the same time, however, Dick
wondered if Perry wasn’t just “an ordinary punk” (55).
Both the repetition of the return to the scene of the crime and the return to
the site of childhood to seek a rational explanation might also be what Brooks
describes as a return to the “nightmare of unprogressive repetition” (125). In this
42
instance a return to the past does not offer clear explanations that then allow us to
move forward. Perhaps that is also one of the horrors of the book—that the
characters seem to be confined by cultural narratives of class but at the same time
those narratives no longer offer satisfying, in the sense of familiar, explanations.
Through his equal emphasis upon the coming-of-age stories of Smith and
Hickock and of the family members they killed, Capote plays with the reader’s
expectations and foregrounds the act of narration itself. Narrating bits and pieces of
the Clutter family member’s lives within the same pages as the men who killed
them “restrains us from sliding too smoothly into the grooves prepared for us by
our present-day preference for the deterministic view of society” (Trilling 111).
Perry Smith’s early life reads like a Dickens novel, a mean and incompetent father,
an alcoholic and promiscuous Native-American mother, a stay at a dysfunctional
Catholic orphanage, ignorance and poverty. However, Capote thwarts our sense of
understanding why the crimes occurred by juxtaposing the disparate life stories of
his main characters. The Hickock story is different. Hickock it not at all the typical
social victim. While he was disadvantaged economically, it was in circumstances
that according to popular belief are supposed to make for the American myth of
success. His parents are described by Capote as hard-working, honest, and loving.
Even after their son was caught in his crime the parents never deserted him
underscoring strong familial bonds and an accompanying sense of loyalty.
Consequently, the ordinariness of Hickock’s early life story potentially disrupts any
binaries between the normal/abnormal, good citizen/bad citizen, us/them.
43
This disruption of binaries through an examination of cultural oddities and
villains has been present throughout Capote’s oeuvre, from his earliest works.
From the stories of A Tree of Night (1946) to In Cold Blood, this examination has
involved underscoring the undifferentiated desires of childhood. In one of Capote’s
early short stories ‘the headless hawk,’ the hero recalls his childhood attraction to
carnival freaks; ‘about those whom he loved there was always a little something
wrong, broken.’ Similarly, the same types of figures appear in Other Voices, Other
Rooms (Miss Wisteria the midget, Jesus Fever, Zoo, etc.) and are often associated
with gothic melodrama. In discussing his encounters with circus freak show acts,
Leslie Fiedler reveals how these so-called oddities like Siamese twins have the
potential to disrupt us/them, self/other binaries:
Confronting them, I could feel the final horror evoked by Freaks stir
to life: a kind of vertigo like that experienced by Narcissus when he
beheld his image in the reflecting waters and plunged to his death. In
joined twins the confusion of self and other, substance and shadow,
ego and other, is more terrifyingly confounded than it is when the
child first perceives face to face in the mirror an image moving as he
moves, though clearly in another world. In that case at least, there
are only two participants, the perceiver and the perceived; but
standing before Siamese twins, the beholder sees them looking not
only at each other, but—both at once—at him. And for an instant it
may seem to him that he is a third brother, bound to the pair before
44
him by an invisible bond; so that the distinction between audience
and exhibit, we and them, normal and Freak, is revealed as an
illusion, desperately, perhaps even necessarily, defended, but
untenable in the end. (35-6)
Capote’s identification with and attraction toward these types of characters plays
into his characterizations of Smith and Hickock as evidenced in examples of their
life histories as presented in the book. However, this same process of identification
has the potential to impact the reader as well. Capote’s depiction of the murderers
combines both aspects of the normal and the abnormal; they are like and not like
us. These conflicting aspects are literally inscribed on their bodies and, as such,
they represent another instance of the inverse of the novel of growth. The
descriptions of Perry Smith emphasize this stunted growth. He is a half-breed
Cherokee, a bed-wetter “with no settled character to his face,” and had legs too
short for his torso: “when he stood up he was no taller than a twelve-year-old child,
and suddenly looked, strutting on two legs that seemed grotesquely inadequate to
the grown-up bulk they supported, not like a well-built truck driver but like a
retired jockey, overblown and muscle-bound” (15). Dick, who had been a high
school athlete and was considered to have all-American good looks, had been badly
injured in an auto accident in 1950 the result of which left him with a face “which
seemed composed of mismatching parts. It was as though his head had been halved
like an apple, then put together a fraction off center” (31).
45
It is important in examining In Cold Blood and its reception to look at the
extraliterary responses to Capote’s investigations. Because the crime was already
part of the public record, Capote himself became a character in the public eye—as a
witness to the investigation and execution. There is a way in which In Cold Blood,
a supposedly objective account of a real crime, is read similarly to Other Voices,
the semi-autobiographical bildingsroman. (Of course, as Paul de Man suggests, any
book by virtue of the author name, has the potential to be read as autobiography.)
Alvin Dewey, a detective who also became a friend of Capote, stated that “Truman
saw himself in Perry Smith, not in being deadly, of course, but in their childhood.
Their childhood was more or less the same; they were more or less the same height,
the same build.” Similarly Dewey’s wife reiterated that both Truman’s and Perry’s
parents had separated early on and that Capote often stated how “it’s strange: in life
you follow a path, and all of a sudden you come to a fork in the road, and either
you take the left or you take the right and he said in this case that he felt he took the
right and Perry the left” (Plimpton 172-3). Smith’s continual references to having
missed his former cellmate Willie Jay at the bus station in Kansas City by five
hours and the contention that if he had met Willie Jay, he would never have called
Dick Hickock echoes this sense of chance and the road not taken.
The criticism surrounding the book has also tended to conflate Truman
Capote and Perry Smith. As one critic writes:
[...]it is hard to figure out where Capote’s reflections end and
Perry’s begin: Capote writes, “[N]or did [Perry] care to chance the
46
loss of a manilla envelope fat with photographs—primarily of
himself, and ranging in time from a pretty –little—boy portrait made
when he was in the Merchant Marine” (Christensen 164)
The critic goes on to suggest that if we consider the “pretty boy” photograph on the
dustjacket of Other Voices it is possible to find a projection of the author himself in
the above quote. Gerald Clarke who wrote one of the more highly regarded Capote
biographies after the author’s death affirms this conflation of Capote and Smith. In
referencing the ongoing correspondence between Smith, Hickock and Capote, after
the former two were incarcerated and awaiting execution, Clarke excerpts a
sentence from a letter Smith wrote to Capote in 1965 just after Smith confessed that
he was “pretty well depressed and broken in spirit lately.” Smith writes: “My Dear
Friend,...what a pair we are? Yes what a pair of poor wretched creatures we are!”
Clarke continues that “[l]eft tantalizingly unclear was who the other half of this pair
was, Truman or Dick” (Clarke 347).
This type of reading may be affected by Capote’s public persona which has
often been described in excessive terms (i.e. flamboyantly homosexual) and
impacts the reading of his relationship with Perry Smith. There are allegations
circulating that Capote was in love with Perry Smith and even that they were
lovers. According to one law enforcement officer, Harold Nye, with the Kansas
Bureau of Investigation, Capote and Smith “had become lovers in the penitentiary.
I can’t prove it, but they spent a lot of time up there in the cell, he spent a
considerable amount of money bribing the guard to go around the corner, and they
47
were both homosexuals and that is what happened. I wasn’t there so....” (188).
Nye’s statement becomes yet another example of the ideology within which and
against which Capote must write. Even the relationship between Smith and
Hickock is often described as latently homosexual. This is foregrounded in the
novel through the mock-tone with which Hickock refers to Smith as “honey”
whenever they have a disagreement. At one point, they pretend that Smith is getting
married and that Hickock is his best man as a ruse to pass bad checks. The mock-
seriousness with which Hickock discusses the marriage plans throws into question
just who is marrying whom. In response to the homoerotics in the novel George
Plimpton asked Capote about the relationship between Smith and Hickock during
an interview in 1966. At the time Capote denied any sexual attraction between the
two. In Capote’s interpretation Hickock was completely heterosexual and Smith
had little sexual interest: “Yes, Perry had been in love with his cellmate Willie-Jay
in the State Prison, but there was no consummated physical relationship. He was
not in love with Dick” (Inge 60).
While the extent of Capote’s involvement with Smith is undocumented, the
primacy of Smith’s narrative in In Cold Blood is often seen as evidence for such
involvement. There are many direct quotes from Perry’s experience, as well as
documentation of his family history—including letters and testimonies from his
sibling and father. As Capote tells the story of Perry Smith in the novel, Smith
alludes to homosexuality a number of times. After committing the murders in
Kansas, Perry and Dick try to escape to Mexico and become temporary guests of a
48
vacationing German man who is openly gay and who has also taken a young local
boy as a lover. In remembering his experiences on a boat as a sixteen-year-old in
the Merchant Marine, Perry states, “[...] I liked being a sailor—seaports and all
that. But the queens on the ship wouldn’t leave me alone....A lot of queens aren’t
effeminate you know” (156). In addition to his homoerotic attraction to his cellmate
Willie-Jay which is alluded to early in the story, we are also told that “Dick’s
literalness, his pragmatic approach to every subject was the primary reason Perry
had been attracted to him, for it made Dick seem, compared to himself, so
authentically tough, invulnerable, “totally masculine” (27). Perry is also reported to
have said that he “had no respect for people who can’t control themselves”(230).
The implication is that Smith committed the murders for Hickock because he was
under the spell of Dick’s masculinity. Hickock planned the murders but Smith
actually committed the murders. Hickock literally becomes Smith’s phallic alter
ego. Smith commits the murders to affirm his masculinity. As one crime
investigator noted” Herb Clutter and Perry [Smith] sort of fed off one another.
Perry saw in Herb Clutter everything that he’d ever wanted in a father and didn’t
have—a home, stability, a family. I think he loved him and hated him” (Plimpton
185). The constant return to the site of Perry’s childhood and his failed relationship
with his father, within an Oedipal thematic, symbolically represents a return to the
primal scene, and suggests that Perry’s killing Mr. Clutter was Perry killing his
father. Perry’s own words support this contention: “I liked the man; I really did. I
liked him right up to the minute I cut his throat.”
49
.Just as in Other Voices where crossing the gender line equates with
homosexuality, Capotes depiction of Smith often combines both masculine and
feminine characteristics, both physically and psychologically. Smith’s depiction
often reveals a softness which can equate with homosexuality and one that plays
into perceptions like those of Nye’s cited earlier. Smith was musically inclined and
like Capote he played with words. Capote writes that Smith’s “tiny feet, encased in
short black boots with steel buckles, would have neatly fitted into a delicate lady’s
dancing slippers” (15). It is also Smith who apparently stopped Hickock from
raping the Clutter daughter, Nancy, and he is also said to havemade the victims as
comfortable as possible. At the same time, his acts of kindness and his softness
make the murders seem even more irrational. We are never allowed to forget that
he is a child-man, that his development is somehow incomplete: “...he was no taller
than a twelve-year-old child, and suddenly looked, strutting on stunted legs that
seemed grotesquely inadequate to the grown-up build they supported, not like a
well-built truck driver but like a retired jockey, overblown and muscle-bound (15).
In line with Other Voices, the potential exists to equate homosexuality with
a state of arrested development. This equation inflects the depictions of other
characters as well. Most notable is the depiction of the youngest murder victim
Kenyon Clutter who at the time he was murdered was poised at that last stage of
adolescence when his best friend is still of the same sex and his sexual desire has
not yet turned to women “...cursed with a lanky boys lack of muscular
coordination. This defect, aggravated by an inability to function without glasses,
50
prevented him from taking more than a token part in those team sports that were the
main occupation of most of the boys who might have been his friends. He had only
one close friend—Bob Jones” (38). Also in the novel, media coverage, and literary
criticism of In Cold Blood, Smith and Hickock are most often referred to by first
name (Perry and Dick) along with the Clutter children Nancy and Kenyon.
Similarly the mother Bonnie Clutter is most often referred to by first name.
As stated earlier, in one working of Freud’s scheme homosexuality is a state
of arrested development in that the child has not moved beyond identification with
the mother. If Perry Smith has a conflict with masculinity then the mother also
figures prominently--an aspect that has been largely overlooked in most criticism of
the book. Bonnie Clutter, like many of Capote’s characters, is described as
‘broken.’ She is depicted as the mad woman in the attic. The one to whom
motherhood did not come easily. Her neighbors described her as cold and distant
and she was said to fear that her children would remember her as “a kind of ghost.”
Capote’s depiction of the mother figure potentially erases the division between the
criminals and their victims in that she is the one character who is described as the
most unstable at least in relation to her role as mother. Bonnie Clutter is depicted as
an absent presence and as such she disrupts the fantasy of the heteronormative
family. She had psychological problems that required a hospital stay several times a
year. As Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend Bobby Rupp said about watching television
with Mr. Clutter, Kenyon and Nancy the night before the Clutters were murdered:
“I figured Mrs. Clutter was asleep—if she was home. You never knew whether she
51
was or not, and I never asked” (50). The sixteen-year-old Nancy functions as
surrogate mother in the above scene as she is also described as having prepared the
evening meal and washed the dishes. The division of labor is entrenched along
typical gender lines within the household as evidenced again the next morning
when Nancy teaches a younger girl from town how to bake a cherry pie.
After Nancy leaves for a 4-H Club meeting, Bonnie Clutter tells this same
young girl from town, who is waiting for a ride from her own mother, that she,
Bonnie, had “a lovely childhood.” The descriptions of her throughout the book
lying curled up in bed in a fetal position wearing a nightgown and white cotton
socks suggest a return to a womb-like state or perhaps to her childhood where she
was once happy. Similarly the spatial separation of children and adults in the house
pairs Bonnie Clutter with her children in that the children and Bonnie Clutter
occupied the upstairs bedrooms while Mr. Clutter slept downstairs in the master
bedroom. She tells the young town girl “I’m sure you will never know what it is to
be tired. I’m sure you’ll always be happy”(26). Bonnie Clutter then shows the
young girl her collection of miniature things, crystal flowers, toy figurines, forks,
knives, “Lilliputian gewgaws” some of which she says she has had since she was a
child. “Little things really belong to you...They don’t have to be left behind. You
can carry them in a shoe box.” The young girl asks, “Carry them to where?” Bonnie
Clutter replies “Why, wherever you go. You might be gone for a long time...Or you
might never go home. And—it’s important to have something of your own. That’s
really yours” (27-8). The positioning of this scene early in In Cold Blood is central
52
to Capote’s critique of hegemonic culture. Here he depicts an inhibiting patriarchal
order and the concepts of normalcy and ownership underpinning the “typical
American family” from which the non-conforming female is also othered.
As in Other Voices, Capote emphasizes crossovers in identifications,
particularly in relationship to childhood. Are the criminals other versions of the
victims? Emphasizing an identification with Bonnie Clutter, Perry Smith also
carries a box of books and assorted collectibles with him in the car as he and
Hickock traverse the country and venture to and from Mexico despite Hickock’s
continual attempt to get him to throw “that junk” out. One of the items that Smith
carries with him is the letter his father wrote to the parole board in which he
detailed Perry Smith’s childhood. In the letter the father emphasizes multiple
possibilities. He states that Perry’s childhood was both good and bad. And as to
whether or not Perry had a happy disposition he replies “yes and no” (126). The
father states that the children were no problem (there were four in all—two were
later to commit suicide) until the mother wanted to move to the city and so she ran
away and took the children. The narrative unfolds with the rational father pitted
against an irrational mother who turns the children against him except for Perry.
The implication is that any bad behavior on Perry’s part is due to his mother’s
influence. As Capote relates the narrative, however, one of the more comforting
memories for Perry was one where he and his siblings watched their mother, “a
lean Cherokee girl” who was a professional rodeo performer ride a bucking bronco.
For Perry the “biography always set racing a stable of emotions—self-pity in the
53
lead, love and hate running evenly at first, the latter ultimately pulling ahead”
(130). The identification with the mother is again repeated in the depiction of
Kenyon who “...in temperament was not in the least Mr. Clutter’s son but rather
Bonnie’s child, a sensitive and reticent boy. His contemporaries thought him
‘stand-offish’ yet forgave him saying, ‘Oh Kenyon. It’s just that he lives in a world
of his own’”(39). If Perry’s killing Mr. Clutter can be read as symbolically killing
his father to affirm his masculinity, then killing Mrs. Clutter symbolically
represents suppressing the feminine. In some earlier psychological and theoretical
frameworks the mother is the true source of the gay man’s feminine sexuality.
The novel is divided into four sections: “The Last to See Them Alive,” the
parallel and intersecting narrative of Hickock’s and Smith’s journey to Holcomb
and the everyday practices of the Clutter family; “Persons Unknown,” the
aftermath of the murders; “Answer,” the resolution of the murder and the capture
and confession of Hickock and Smith; and “The Corner,” dealing with the
prolonged prosecution and final execution of the murderers. Capote wishes to
create and “openness” in the narrative that destabilizes consensual certainties about
not only the ethical and social issues raised in the novel concerning capital
punishment, but also the act of storytelling itself (Wells 190). Capote recognizes in
the structure of his work that notions of both rationality and system are undermined
by the “visible evidence that history is the concatenated and reified effect of
incoherent motives and chance convergences” (White 19). Whereas the model of
the bildungsroman seems to imply progress, a leading forth, and developmental
54
change, Smith’s and Hickock’s stories represent the working through of past
histories, an attempt to return to the origin as the source or motivation for all the
rest. As Brooks writes, “the past needs to be incorporated as past within the present,
mastered through the play of repetitions in order for there to be difference, change,
progress” (134). Instead, Capote maps a terrain which redetermines an event as “a
hypothetical presupposition necessary to the constitution of a documentary record
whose inconsistencies, contradictions, gaps and distortions ... presumed to be [its]
common referent itself moves to the fore as the principal object of investigation”
(White 22). Capote’s search for the reason why the murders occurred offers no
conclusions. The past becomes a series of random connections between the
murderers and their victims.
Richard Brooks’ 1967 film version of In Cold Blood fails to engage the
ambiguities Capote’s narrative foregrounds, relying instead on a docudrama style to
historicize the events. Brooks seems more interested in re-affirming law and order,
masculinity, and the family in the 1960s while Capote questions the stability of
those structures by foregrounding the instability of narrative itself. Being able to
control the past means being in control of the present self: “The past self mastered
through memory grounds the proof of truth in the present” (Probyn 454). Capote’s
account, however, provides a model of memory that privileges the messiness of
past, present, and memory—even as he promotes his own powers of retention. In
In Cold Blood, the line of memory here is constantly upset and dislocated by “ all
the choices I did and didn’t make” (Probyn 454). It is not the events themselves
55
that reveal the truth of the story but how those events and surrounding discourses
are situated within the narrative and how narratives like this play into larger
cultural fantasies, in this instance of home, family, and adolescence that is at issue.
56
Chapter 2
Haunted America:
John Rechy and (Re)membering Home
Living on the borders and in the margins, keeping intact
one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to
swim in a new element , an alien element...that has become
familiar—never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold
the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd. No, not comfortable
but home.
Gloria Anzaldua
Although classified as a novel, City of Night by John Rechy is loosely
autobiographical and chronicles the travels of a young man as he crisscrosses the
United States “longing for something still vastly undefined” (81) and supporting
himself by hustling on the streets. This liminality with regards to genre invites
comparisons between Rechy as a gay Chicano and his unnamed central narrator,
and such comparisons have continued to inform the readings of the text. The
addition of an introduction to the 1984 edition of City of Night further foregrounds
the autobiographical traces within the novel. In this introduction Rechy asserts that
the book began as a letter to a friend: “The letter went on to evoke crowded
memories of that Mardi Gras season, a culmination of the years I had spent
57
traveling back and forth across the country—carrying all my belongings in an army
duffel bag; moving in and out of lives, sometimes glimpsed briefly but always felt
intensely” (1). Through the use of an unnamed narrator who claims to be retelling
his story, Rechy disavows the autobiographical genre by not inscribing “the self.”
Instead, he “unwrites” his life by creating a fictional narrator to tell his story and
from whom he continually withdraws confirming only peripheral similarities with
himself.
Despite and even as a result of these characteristics, it should be noted that
Rechy’s City of Night is not officially classified as an autobiography, or for that
matter as a coming out narrative (even though the central character is often viewed,
like Rechy himself, as a Gay Chicano). However, the work does share some
common characteristics with both autobiographical and coming-out genres.
Autobiographies often highlight a critical or decisive moment or obstacle in the
writer’s past which functions as a lens through which the various and disparate
elements of the writer’s life are considered, reviewed, and ultimately shaped into a
narrative. For lesbian and gay writers, the coming out process is often thus
privileged as a master narrative and presented as the decisive event that shapes their
lives and becomes the primary focus of their autobiographies.
Coming-out narration, like traditional autobiographies, has a trajectory
which looks to the past, but for these narratives the life prior to coming out is often
viewed as false. As Diana Fuss observes: “In both gay and lesbian literature, a
familiar tension emerges between a view of identity as that which is always there
58
(but has been buried under layers of cultural repression) and that which has never
been socially permitted (but remains to be formed created, or achieved)”
(Essentially Speaking 100). As Fuss indicates there is an underlying tension in such
narratives between essentialist and constructivist theorizations on identity. A
similar tension exists in Rechy’s City of Night when the book is read, as it often is,
as an account of the protagonist’s coming to terms with his sexuality—this
essentialist thrust potentially disrupts Rechy’s generally postmodern
conceptualizations of identity as both fragmented and performative, underscoring
our cultural confusion and anxiety over how we define identity. More importantly,
what this tension reveals about gay and lesbian authorship is that life and text are
coeval and achieve an uncanny resemblance: the process of life and living becomes
closely aligned to the processes and functions of narration itself.
Critics note that the discursive strategies of early gay autobiographies are
reliant on strategies of identity formations that are either based on conceptions of
sameness or on conceptions of difference. (Here I invoke “sameness” and
“difference” simply to establish the larger characteristics of a genre, and do not
intend to dismiss the inherent complexities attending each term.) Similarly, Lee
Edelman theorizes “homographesis,” his term for the process of gay inscription, in
two phases. The first phase of this inscriptive process has a regulatory function:
Where heterosexuality, in other words, seeks to assure the
sameness or purity internal to categorical “opposites” of anatomical
“sex” by insisting that relations of desire must testify to a difference
59
only imaginable outside, and thus “between,” those two “natural,”
“self-evident” categories, homosexuality would multiply the
differences that desire can apprehend in ways that menace the
internal coherence of the sexed identities that the order of
heterosexuality demands. Homosexuality is constituted as a
category, then, to name a condition that must be represented as
determinate, as legibly identifiable, precisely in so far as it threatens
to undo the determinacy of identity itself. (14)
During the second phase, the inscriptive process exposes the difference that
is internal to the same and “defines as central to ‘homosexuality’ a refusal of the
specifications of identity (including sexual identity) performed by the cultural
practice of a regulatory homographesis that marks out the very space within which
to think ‘homosexuality’ itself. Like writing, that is, it de-scribes itself in the very
moment of its inscription” (14). This de-scribing is achieved by confounding the
distinction between difference and sameness.
Edelman’s conceptualization of homographesis then suggests that the
coming-out narrative potentially both resists and colludes with the heterosexual
hegemony in that the construction of gay and lesbian identity is often predicated on
an affirmation of its contrary, heterosexuality. In Rechy’s work, the intrusion of a
heteronormative paradigm is evidenced in the narrator’s repeated call to return
home to El Paso as a point of purity and origin. He is determined, for example, that
the money he uses for the trip home not be “street money” acquired through
60
hustling (81). Home is laced with memories that constrain and he realizes that the
only way to resist these “lulling echoes” of childhood which reinscribe him within
the heteronormative paradigm, is to usurp those memories in the very city where he
grew up. Once again, it is the familiar move in gay and lesbian life writing where
the narrator must reappropriate the space to accommodate his or her “authentic”
self. But of course the task is neither so easy nor so formulaic.
Home
The image which opens John Rechy’s City of Night, is that of a child gazing
through a window as a Texas dust storm rages outside. While what is depicted is
the child’s isolated view of a chaotic world from the seeming security of his
“home,” this opening also creates an inside/outside binary that will be continually
transgressed, complicated, and multiplied throughout the novel. The narrator’s
memories of childhood are also significant to the formation of a self in that Rechy’s
narrative, like Capote’s In Cold Blood, agitates cultural investments in linear
trajectories that move from childhood to adulthood and historically reaffirm a
temporal continuity that explains how the adult subject came to be. Rechy’s
repeated images of home also suggest that the site is continually shifting, mobile,
problematic and not necessarily the safe haven that “home” generally obtains in the
cultural imaginary.
The window through which Rechy’s narrator gazes as a child in the opening
pages of City of Night is situated in a house that is described as “serene, safe from
the wind” (10) but the sense of security that home provides for the child is short-
61
lived as the family is forced to find a new rental home. Jeffrey Weeks has written,
that despite all we know of the actual shortcomings and limitations of life within
the traditional nuclear family, we fall back, in the absence of an alternative
discourse, on “the security of what we know, or believe, to be secure and stable, a
haven...where those who feel besieged may find protection” (Weeks 127).
Accordingly, David Morley in Home Territories raises the question as to what price
must be paid for the “protection” behind the walls of the purified space of
domesticity, and who does the paying? (78). Symbolically the description of the
decaying house the protagonist’s family moves to in Rechy’s work signifies the
disintegration of the traditional family and the heteronormative space of home.
Rechy writes: “I stand looking at the house in child panic...the wooden porch
decayed, almost on the verge of toppling down; it slanted like a slide...The house
smells of rot” (10-11).
In the novel, home quickly extends to include “hometown” and an ensuing
disruption in the hitherto purified space of the domestic house, because, ironically,
the pull of the streets has followed the narrator home. In the 1984 edition of City of
Night Rechy added an introduction that foregrounds the lure of the streets. He
asserts “my life assumed this pattern: I would invade the streets and live within
their world eagerly; then I would flee, get a job, walk out of it–and return to the
waiting streets like a repentant lover. Often his life away from the streets follows
him into the streets and in one instance he even experiences the fusion of his “two
identities”(xi)—a “closeness” from which he must flee. And then again in the next
62
instance the perspective changes and he returns to a third person position who is
“ordering” the chaotic reality” (xii) by imposing “structure” and “discovered
meaning” as well as emphasizing how selective memory is.
Rechy writes on the first page of City of Night that his narrative “...should
begin in El Paso,” and several lines later he writes that he “can’t remember now”
some of the specifics. This dual and seemingly oppositional frame, at once hints at
the narrative conventions of what some have labeled “childhood memorial” writing
and at the same time to the failures of such narratives—re-membering in the midst
of forgetting. What such narratives often yield are varied and multiple threads that
weave a scrap of tapestry, which not unlike Penelope’s loom, simultaneously and
strategically unravels what it has woven, corresponding to Rechy’s stated project to
“unwrite” his life. These narrative fragments thus make up the “life” Rechy
presents; they are often theatrical vignettes, performances. And as I have suggested
before, through these fragments, the material text itself is equally energetic about
performing a life that we’re being constantly told is ultimately a performance as
well which is also mirrored in the shifting typographies of the city both real and
imagined:
Once, years ago, El Paso had been a crossroads, between the
Eastcoast and the Westcoast, for the stray fairies leaving other cities for
whatever reason. ...the inevitable smalltimecity roundup had come. The
cops had swooped jealously on the faeries and to jail they went—and from
jail: Away again...
63
I went to a movie theater in South El Paso—resolved, that night, to
slaughter those seducing memories in this way:
The man followed me to the head, propositioned me there. I
pretended I was a transient, reverting to the poses learned in New York. I
told him I needed money. He agreed. In a parked car, in a dark section of
this childhood city, I made it....rather than feeling liberated as I had
expected, I felt a scorching horrendous guilt.
And I knew that no matter how long I would be in El Paso, I would never
again allow that other life of New York to touch me here. (83)
This scene suggests the extent to which the attempts to stabilize the
assumed “purity” of the heteronormative home has failed the narrator. In fact an
identity alliance is claimed with a community that at the time of Rechy’s writing
was certainly living on the margins: the queer spaces that are referenced in the
scene; spaces that are depicted as being under siege. For contemporary readers, no
doubt the description of ‘the cops swooping down on faeries and taking them to
jail’ will bring to mind what will happen in Stonewall some six years later to
forever change not just the politics, but the ways queer identity would come to be
conceptualized. Rechy’s or the narrator’s affinity with this community comes
across in somewhat hyper-romantic terms, when we realize that these queer spaces,
and the invasion of them, are the content of the “seducing memories.” For those
who have read Rechy, the bravado implied by the gesture of presenting police raids
as seduction is not atypical: It is the posture of the devil-may-care street hustler that
64
Rechy continually performs in the novel. Indeed, the narrator decides to recuperate
the seduction by assuming the role of the hustler, and to do so explicitly and
overtly. Once again the narrative aligns with identity itself, exposing the
performativity of both. As Rechy writes, “I pretended I was a transient, reverting
to the poses learned in New York”. The descriptions of El Paso also hint at the
extent to which memory, sight, and love are all open to re-conceptualization, and
can influence the construction of identity--to borrow a concept from Peggy Phelan-
-and how such immaterial aspects can also shape our perceptions of place.
7
In this
way, the scene reveals, that the return to the site of the childhood home, as a way of
stabilizing identity, might actually foreground its continual construction, for the
streets of El Paso are all the mean streets of New York. If “home” is the primary
site for interpolating the subject within the heterosexual matrix and its ensuing
gender and sexual identities, the failure to maintain the purity of the space of home
in Rechy’s narrative might be read as strategic in that in addition to destabilizing
gender and sexual identities within that framework it also contests the alignment of
these traditional roles with being a Chicano.
Identity and Performance
The narrator’s travels themselves reveal an exploration of identity as
evidenced through Rechy’s central and unnamed narrator’s quest for home,
negotiating the streets as he negotiates his ethnic heritage, his sexual orientation,
and the larger issue as to what it means to be an “American.” Rechy’s text suggests
65
that identity is constituted through a series of shifting performances that reflect
multiple identifications with a variety of communities. Rechy’s tactic is to avoid a
reinscription of normative, identity—mediated by hierarchaical oppositions—by
continually foregrounding identity as a series of continuous and at times conflicting
performances. These performances include not only the narrator playing out a
series of characters on the street, but the novel/work itself engaged in a narrative
sleight- of-hand by self consciously blurring the genres of autobiography and
fiction in the City of Night, and even normative grammatical structures, no doubt
engaging one of the most ongoing debates within the genre of autobiography itself,
that continues to ask the question that to what extent is the autobiographical
production itself fictional.
The characters’ acts of reinvention throughout the novel further this
question and our notions of cultural as well as individual identity as being static.
Throughout City of Night Rechy repeatedly questions the possibility of “knowing”:
“How many of all the people I had known had ever begun to know me?” (360). As
the narrator evidences, identity cannot be defined beyond the momentary
parameters of a given performance. Simultaneously, the novel reveals the centrality
of reading/interpreting performances along lines of gender and sexuality to
establishing an “identity” in American culture. The repetition of performative acts
then functions as a metaphor for identity in general and an ongoing tension between
an undifferentiated otherness and a banal sameness as the following excerpt
reveals:
66
I walk along Main Street, Los Angeles, now. The juke-boxes blare
their welcome. Dingy bars stretch along the blocks—three-feature
moviehouses, burlesque joints, army and navy stores; gray rooming
houses squeezed tightly hotly protesting against one
another....Instantly I recognize the vagrant youngmen dotting those
places: the motorcyclists without bikes, the cowboys without horses,
awol servicemen on leave....And I know that moments after arriving
here, I have found an extension , in the warm if smoggy sun, of the
world I had just left. (88)
Correspondingly, the performances themselves are always suspect and open to
audience interpretation. With regard to his scores, the narrator reflects that “I had
acted out a role for them—as I had acted it out for how many, many others?” (341).
In New Orleans, one of his scores sees through the narrator’s impassive veneer,
pointing out that he acts in order to fulfill the pre-existing hustler image that society
has invented: “Like all other legends, it’s already there, made by the world, waiting
for him to fit it. And he tries to live up to what’s he’s supposed to be” (360).
Rechy’s encounter with one of his johns, significantly, a former professor of
literature, foregrounds the construction of identity and an awareness of the
performance itself. During an extended scene in which the professor shows the
narrator a photo album containing photos of all the young men he has had
relationships with, (he calls the young men angels), the professor’s descriptions of
the young men contrast with the narrator’s “reading” of the photographs. While the
67
professor claims that the photographs of the various young men represent the
indefinite shape of love, the narrator begins to see a sameness in the gaze that the
young men project in the photographs: “...all staring at the world with a look
strangely in common: a look which at first I thought was a coldness behind the
smile and then realized must be a kind of muted despair, a franticness to get what
the world had offered others and not extended readily to them...I wondered if I
would photograph with the same hard look (78). The narrator discovers that his
attractiveness on the streets increases in direct relation to the degree of insensitivity
and toughness he projects. Thus, he acknowledges that the figuration of the hustler
he projects is just another role that he performs. “I would wear a mask,” he declares
(33).
For Rechy, the preoccupation with performance as identity extends into an
area one would think was more stable: the identification of one’s ethnicity. Indeed
Rechy’s reluctance to do so has made him the object of some criticism by critics of
color. However, some critics like Homi Bhabha have pointed out that minority
discourses contest genealogies of “origin” by acknowledging the status of national
culture and the people as a contentious performative space (157). This is probably
best revealed in the second part of the novel when the narrator reads the graffiti on
a bathroom wall. While the scene more pointedly attacks constructions of gender
and sex than it does race through a reworking of the predominant creation myth in
American culture: nonetheless, as positioned in the novel it potentially underscores
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the ability of narrative to also “unwrite” the narrative conventions about identity
that our culture invests in:
Over the streaky urinal, crude obscene drawings, pleading
messages jump at you. Someone has described himself glowingly, as
to age, appearance, size. Beneath the self-glorifying description,
another had added: “Yes, but are you of good family?” Another
scrawled note—a series: “Candy is a queen.” “No she isn’t.” “Yes I
am...” And in bold, shouting black letters across the wall:
IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED FAIRIES/THEY MADE
MEN. (89).
Given the primacy of sexuality in Rechy’s narrative, and given his mixed
blood status as part Mexican and part Anglo, the descriptions of the decaying house
accrue an increased significance. As Chicana lesbian critics such as Gloria
Anzaldua and Cherie Moraga have observed, because homosexuality subverts
patriarchal family structure and binary gender constructs, it is perceived as a threat
to the Chicana/o community.
8
Rather than positioning the narrator’s sexuality in
opposition to this structure, Rechy posits his homosexuality as an outgrowth of that
patriarchal family structure. His narrator’s repeated returns to the site of childhood
throughout the novel become strategic in subverting the normative patriarchal
family structure that is central to Chicano culture. If one reads in line with
traditional interpretations of the return to the site of childhood as a search for
origins that explain how the adult comes to be, then Rechy posits the origins of his
69
narrator’s potential queerness through his relationship with his father and his
father’s friends and the site of his childhood home.
The narrator recounts his estranged relationship with his father who was
once an accomplished musician and orchestra conductor whom he now describes as
embittered yet capable of occasional moments of tenderness. When the narrator
was eight his father taught him a game: His father would say “give me a thousand”
and the young narrator would hop on his father’s lap while the father fondled him
intimately after which he would give the boy a penny or sometimes a nickel. His
father’s friends would also play the game with the young boy, sometimes passing
him around the table each giving him a nickel. Positioned early in the narrative this
recollection becomes the genesis for the narrator’s future as a hustler—gay sex for
pay. At the onset, then, Rechy’s narrative depicts the site of family as dysfunctional
which is at odds with the importance of family in the Chicano/a community. As the
narrator notes, “…I began to sense that this journey away from a remote childhood
window was a kind of rebellion against an innocence which nothing in the world
justified” (55).
Rechy’s narrative also both engages with and disrupts some of the traditions
in typical coming of age narratives, traditions that are not necessarily race specific.
As Meaghan Morris has noted there is an ingrained masculinist tradition in coming
of age narratives that inscribes home as a site of “frustrating containment” as well
as a site of a truth of some sort to be discovered or recovered. In these narratives,
home is often described as stifling and the place from which the journey begins and
70
to which it returns: “The tourist leaving and returning to the blank space of the
domus is, and will remain, a sexually in-different ‘him’”(Morris 12). The repeated
departures and returns to and from home by Rechy’s protagonist play to this
masculinist tradition of home as containment in that it is at home where he sexually
behaves himself while simultaneously the frequency of his departures and returns
undermines the linear trajectory of this masculinist tradition by potentially fusing
the two worlds. His actions, the constant leaving and returning home, also
foreground his mobility which tends to keep Rechy’s protagonist within a
masculinist framework. Yet, the memories of home that haunt him throughout his
travels are often laced with traces of his ethnicity that potentially inhibits his
movement.
Janet Wold notes that the problem with terms like “nomad” and “travel” is
that they are not usually “located” and they suggest ungrounded and unbounded
movement, since the whole point is to resist fixed selves/viewers/subjects.
However, the consequent suggestion of free and equal mobility is itself a deception,
since we don’t have the same access to the road (qtd in Morley 68). It may be that
the choice not to disclose the protagonist’s ethnic heritage is necessary within
Rechy’s schematic for the traveler of color to have greater mobility. Once again,
life and text are coeval in that the text potentially gains greater mobility by
reaching a wider audience if race is unremarked, particularly in 1963 when the
novel was first published. While the normative trajectory for a bildungsroman or
coming-of-age narrative is a movement away from home, for the narrator of City of
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Night, it is “home” from which he never escapes: “With those many people—only
in those moments when I was desired—the moments before we became strangers
again after the intimacy—I felt an electric happiness, as if the relentless flow of life
had stopped, poised on the very pinpoint of youth; and for those moments , youth
was suspended unmoving” (120).
Whereas gay identity and performance are foregrounded in all of Rechy’s
novels, ethnicity is articulated in more subtle ways. When City of Night is read in
its original version, without the introduction that Rechy added in 1984, the overt
Chicana/o signs can be easily overlooked or so a number of critics have contended
and hence his work has often been excluded from the canon of Mexican-American
/Chicano works. However, I would like to suggest that his self-positioning as a
Chicano is by no means entirely absent. In the novel’s first section, in which the
narrator recalls his turbulent childhood in El Paso, his remembrances of his mother
are intertwined with social and material aspects that are decidedly ethnic, “a
beautiful Mexican woman who loves me fiercely,” her Virgin of Guadalupe dolls,
and the Nacimiento, a nativity scene his father constructed each Christmas and
before which he mother said a rosary (14). Even in New York the sound of the
showers at the YMCA recall childhood song, “a Mexican kid song: Let it rain, let it
rain, Virgin of the Cave’” (25). Later, when he brings a hustler friend to his bare
room in the YMCA that thus far has revealed no trace as to the character of the
room’s inhabitant, the one personal item that is noted is the Mexican blanket that
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his mother had sent him. Its brightness juxtaposed to the bland, sterile, and nearly
empty room.
Karen Christian observes that, paradoxically, sexuality is the site of
simultaneous rejection and expression of ethnicity for many of Rechy’s Chicano
characters. The narrator of City of Night, she contends, is driven by a need to break
free from the stifling, unconditional love of his ethnic mother, escaping into a
radical life-style that rejects the traditional gender roles of his ethnic heritage. He
disappears into the gay subculture by disavowing his ethnicity (41-42); While
Christian gives an insightful reading of the problematics of and/or impossibility of
performing as both gay and Chicano and Rechy’s renderings of identity as
performance, she nonetheless posits a static definition of Chicano identity much as
my own reading tends to do by continuing to invoke the term Chicano without
accounting for the variances within the Chicano community. Similarly, Ramon
Saldivar has tried to show how Chicana/o identity is subjectivity in process but as
Christian herself as well as other critics have contended, his emphasis on material
aspects of culture and identity in his repeated references to “Chicanos and their
narratives” undermines his anti-essentialist intentions (Christian 11). Some critics
have suggested viewing Chicano works as hybridic texts as a way to account of the
variances within the Chicano community itself and outside influences.
9
Renato
Rosaldo has gone as far to say that all cultures “contain no zones of purity, because
they undergo continuous processes of transculturation. Instead of hybridity versus
purity, this view suggests that it is hybridity all the way down” (xv). However,
73
other critics like Ella Shohat offer a cautionary note on the use of the term
“hybridity” which she contends is often used as a catch-all term that “fails to
discriminate between diverse modalities of hybridity, for example, forced
assimilation, internalized self rejection, political cooptation, social conformism,
cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence” (110). The extent to which I use the
term here is to denote a subject whose processes of identification suggest an
ambivalent relationship to the signs of empire/nation and the signs of “citizen” thus
the hybridic text becomes a site where meaning does not line up.
10
Tomas Almaguer’s discussion of this invisibility and the problematics of
male homosexuality within Chicano culture is useful in understanding the
difficulties of negotiating multiple cultural influences and the problematics of
delineating boundaries between conflicting and overlapping affiliations. While his
study lacks the specificity of how location impacts identity in terms of the
Mexican-American or Chicano experience, nonetheless his work does give insight
into some of the cultural influences Rechy’s character must negotiate in his article
“Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior.” Almaguer
contends that there is no parallel to the Anglo-American gay man in
Chicano/Latino cultures because of the influence of Latin American paradigms of
gender and sexuality. Almaguer’s research on homosexuality in Latin America
suggests that for Latino men sexual identity is assigned on the basis of sexual aim,
not object choice (77). Within this paradigm a man may be “activo”—the anal
penetrator who is not stigmatized because his behavior is considered part of
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“normal” male sexuality—or passivo—the anal-passive individual, who is viewed
as subservient and feminized (78). Rechy’s treatment of his protagonist’s potential
homosexuality in City of Night, coincides with Almaguer’s observations in that the
central character does not view himself as gay or homosexual as long as he is on
the receiving end of oral sex with other men and as long as it is done for pay. But
such assertions are not necessarily exclusively Latino since most of the hustlers,
many of whom are white, follow the same set of rules. According to Rechy’s novel
the rules of the street are as follows: “as long as the hustler goes only with
queens—and with other men only for scoring (which is making or taking
sexmoney, getting a meal, making a pad)—he is himself not considered “queer”—
he remains, in the vocabulary of that world, “trade” (97). Because of these
intersecting and often conflicting affiliations, identity, as Rechy shows, may be
multiple, fluid and open but it is not infinitely so and it is often impacted by past
and present power relations.
11
Gender and the drag queens
While a number of critics have contended that Rechy exposes the sexual
underground, I would like to suggest that Rechy constructs his narrative in
opposition to such criticisms in that his novel reveals the pervasiveness of what
some have labeled the “sexual underground,”
12
by inverting the normative spatial
arrangements through which the novel’s protagonist navigates, particularly as they
pertain to the home, city, state, and nation, sites that are central to this series of
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shifting performances and the pervasiveness of what many of his critics, although
well-intentioned, continually invoke as deviant behavior. Although Rechy
advocates the position of outlaw in response to hegemonic, and therefore
heterosexist behavior codes, the repeated criticisms of his characters as deviant and
fringe tend to minoritize the view point and promote a ghettoization of his work. If
one of the preoccupations of Rechy’s work has been to foreground the instability of
narrative, and the limits of legibility of life or identity that shape his desire to
produce the text that “unwrites”, the figure that Rechy explicitly uses to do so is
that of the drag queen, particularly Miss Destiny, in City of Night, who challenges
the binaries of gender and sexuality. Although the spectacle of the drag queen is
often overlooked as a simple form of gender parody, a closer reading of their
performances once again calls attention to the narrative itself as kind of an
autobiographical drag. As one character declares in the City of Night: “Dressing up
. . . does not mean wearing costumes!” (248). What Rechy wants to say about
identity, narrative, and/as drag itself is that the state of the “performance” is
changed by the very attention he draws to it. Rechy writes: “Hips siren curved,
wrists lily-delicate broken, they will stare in defiant demureness from theater
screens and home screens all over the country: and those painted male faces will
challenge—and, Maybe, for an instant, be acknowledged by—the despising,
arrogant, apathetic world that produced them and exiled them (284).
“Miss Destiny,” who is the most prominent drag queen in the novel, has a
wish to be (mis)taken for a “real” woman to the extent that she will be asked to
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marry and participate in a wedding. Through the depiction of Miss Destiny, who is
a transexual, Rechy de-essentializes his narrator’s masculinity:
She-he (Miss Destiny is man)—went on about her—his—
restlessness, her husbands, asking me questions in between, figuring
out how Bad I was...looking alternately coyly and coldly at Chuck
them me seductively: all of which you will recognize as the queen’s
technique to make you feel like such an irresistable so masculine so
sexual so swinging stud, and queens can do it better than most real
girls, queens being Uninhibited (95-7).
The figure of the drag queen, a biological male performing as female,
reveals the distinction between biological sex and gender as construction. In this
way masculinity which is dependent on its opposite femininity is also revealed as
construction because they are no longer tied to a specific biological sex.
13
After spending a series of evenings with Miss Destiny in various downtown
hustler bars and partying with groups of momentary friends, the narrator
left Los Angeles without seeing Miss Destiny after that night. And I
went to San Diego briefly. And I returned to Los Angeles...A few of
the people I had known were gone –even in that short time—back to
the midwest or to Times Square, or had been busted, or moved to
Coffee Andy’s in Hollywood, or gone to Golden Miami (117).
The narrator asks numerous hustlers and drag queens if they have heard from Miss
Destiny and if she ever had her “fabulous wedding.” While no one seemed to have
77
actually attended the wedding, they all had a story as to her getting married to a
doctor in New York or in Beverly Hills. These fragmented and conflicting
narratives coincide with Gregory Bredbeck’s assertion that Rechy’s narrative
practice in his early hustler novels deviates from conventional storytelling by
barely stringing contingently related encounters along in order to reproduce the
quality of a hustler’s life of arbitrarily sequenced tricks (Bredbeck 584-5).
This narrative practice then once again “unwrites” the life story. As critic
Ricardo Ortiz has noted Miss Destiny embodies missed destinies and a kind of
refusal or failure of the teleological thrust of conventional narrative; this makes her
wish for a symbolic ceremony just that much more insistent, however, as well just
that much more impossible: “That stubborn thing” that refuses to obey the logic of
Miss Destiny’s imaginary self-construction and confirms her own sophisticated
sense of the falsehood of her “impersonating a man” regardless of the ‘Thing
between his legs which should belong there only if it is somebody else’s’ suggests
that Rechy’s text struggles, in its own way, to develop a signifying practice that can
accommodate such complicated inversions” (173). But it is perhaps the disjuncture
these inversions invoke that is precisely Rechy’s intention:
Miss thing said to (Miss Thing is a fairy perched on my back
like some people have a monkey or a conscience)....”Miss Destiny
dear, dont be a fool, fix your lovely hair and find you a new
husband—make it permanent this time by really getting Married--
...and Miss Destiny dear, have a real wedding this time”.... A real
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wedding, Miss Destiny sighed wistfully. “Like every young girl
should have at least once....And when it happens oh it will be the
most simpuhlee Fabulous wedding the Westcoast has evuh seen!
with the oh most beautiful queens as bridesmaids! and the
handsomest studs as ushers!...—and Me!...Me...in virgin-
white...coming down a winding staircase (98).
According to Ortiz, this inversion of the conventional heterosexual dream of a
wedding, a ritual which is the instituting ground of heterosexuality and
heteronormativity, merely winds down, drained of energy the minute the wish is
spoken. As Ortiz notes, it fails as both narrative and symbol, and her projected
“me” can only “wind” down, descend into the abyssal hole of its own “compulsive
self-perpetuation as fantasy”. While Ortiz critiques the failure of Rechy’s narrative
technique, it is perhaps the limitations of our narrative practices to which Rechy
points, narrative being one of the primary tools through which identity is
formulated.
14
Miss Destiny’s story might then be read not so much as an inversion
but more akin to an act of mimicry which displays an ambivalence toward
hegemonic culture and the gender prescriptions that such systems produce.
15
Following Miss Destiny’s wedding description, a young hustler’s contention that
Miss Destiny will get busted if she has a wedding that isn’t “real” (because she is
not a biological woman) in addition to pointing to the sad reality of the situation for
Miss Destiny, getting busted also represents a potential revelation and affront to the
system that Miss Destiny would welcome: “They will bust you again for sure if you
79
have that wedding, Miss Destinee,” said Chuck gravely. “It would be worth it,”
sighed Miss Destiny. “Oh, it would be worth it” (96).
Several chapters later, Rechy’s narrator’s offers an account of “real girls”
who are also drawn to the male hustlers in Pershing Square: “Among the bands of
male hustlers that hang out in downtown Los Angeles, there are often few stray
girls: They are quite young, usually prematurely hardened, toughlooking even
when they’re pretty They know all about the youngmen they make it with: that
these youngmen hustle and clip other males. And knowing this, they don’t seem to
care” (144). Ortiz says these girls are not the heroic victims of some new
apocalypse but its detritus. They do not figure into the narrative so much as mark
its contingent limits; they stray on the borders of what is possible in Rechy’s sexual
and textual worlds (Ortiz 172).
Similarly, later in the same section, the narrator chooses to hear yet another
version of his fellow hustler Chuck’s childhood over making a score. In one
instance the narrator even directly addresses the reader “—but that story Chuck just
told me, as you yourself should be the first one to admit, is oh Too Much to
believe!” (119). The effect of such direct addresses is to potentially legitimize the
narrator’s story by throwing suspicion on the stories told by other hustlers and drag
queens...but it also has the potential to discredit his own account in that, as a hustler
he too is subject to “telling tales.” The effect is to foreground the instability of
narrative as well as performance.
80
Rechy’s hustler characters also play an important role in deconstructing the
hegemonic correlation of sex, desire, and gender identity, by repeatedly alluding to
the tenuousness of these characters’ masculine performances. As well, they, like
the drag queens represent an opportunity to rethink or at least question social norms
in general:
And the hustler emphasizes his masculinity in one of various
poses—one leg propped against the wall; cigarette held between
thumb and finger--... the rehearsed, inviting Tough look. (151)
...Just as the queens become a parody of femininity, many in
this leathered group are parodies of masculinity: posing stiffly;
mirror-practiced looks of disdain nevertheless soliciting those they
seek to attract. (241)
...as obviously emphatically masculine as the queens’ are
emphatically obviously feminine and for the same reason to
emphasize the roles they will play. (102)
The narrator in City of Night reveals a series of types throughout his travels in New
York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, and El Paso: Men who
paid other men “sex money.” These hustlers incorporated a series of roles :
I learned that there are a variety of roles to play if you’re hustling:
youngmanoutofajob butlooking; dontgiveadmanyoungman drifting;
perennialhustler easytomakeout;youngmanlostinthebigcity
pleasehelpmesir. therewas, too, the pose learned quickly from the
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others along the street: thestance, the jivetalk—a mixture of jazz,
joint, junk sounds—the almost-disdainful, disinterested, but, at the
same time, inviting look; the casual way of dress (32).
A fellow hustler outlines the rules that he claims define identity on the
streets:
Whatever a guy does with other guys, if he does it for money, that
don’t make hims queer. You’re still straight. It’s when you start
doing it for free, with other guys, that you start growing wings.” (40)
Maintaining one’s masculinity is aligned with a negation of same-sex desire by
keeping these sexual acts within a capitalist framework of economic exchange.
However, as regards Rechy’s narrator in City of Night, it becomes exceedingly
difficult to demarcate a distinction between gay sex for pay and what becomes
increasingly evident as the narrator’s own repressed sexual desires. What Tomas
Almaguer has noted in American culture as the “one drop rule” scenario, if a male
partakes of a homosexual act even once he is labeled as homosexual, may account
for readings within an American context. Additionally, a culturally prescribed and
internalized homophobia may also account for the repeated denial of same-sex
desire, a denial that is also part of a commodification process in which for the
majority of these hustlers their marketability is dependent on continually
performing as straight. To “grow wings” then becomes equated with economic
death. When City of Night was published in 1963 The New York Times Review of
Books epitomized the homophobia of the time with the headline “Fruit Salad”
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asserting that “’City of Night’ reads like the untrue Confessions of a Male Whore
as told to Jean Genet, Djuna Barnes, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Thomas Wolfe,
Fanny Hurst…”
This denial of same-sex desire is often manifested in the form of
homosexual panic which is often a response to the unmasking of the artificiality of
dominant categories of gender and sexuality in acknowledging one’s own potential
for homosexuality. The result gives rise to a crisis of categories themselves as
evidenced by a character in City of Night for whom the very presence of
homosexuals reveals the way in which he has been interpolated into dominant
culture: “Gay people . . . seem to cancel out so much that could be. . . . The
effeminate ones . . . they frighten me. They seem sometimes to know so much.
With a look , they can make you feel—so—well—so--...like you’re trapped (228-
230). Eve Sedgwick’s theorization on the closet in Epistemology of the Closet gives
further insight into the epistemological crisis underpinning homosexual panic:
…If such compulsory relationships as male friendship, mentorship,
admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and
heterosexual rivalry all involve forms of investment that force men
into arbitrarily mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled
quicksands of the middle distance of homosocial desire, then it
appears that men enter into adult masculine entitlement only through
acceding to the permanent threat that the small space they have
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cleared for themselves on this terrain may always, just as arbitrarily
and with just as much justification , be foreclosed (186).
By exposing the pervasiveness of what some have labeled the sexual
underground and emphasizing the “homo-act,” Rechy’s novel seemingly advances
a theory of homo-relationality: “Whereas hetero-relationality positions the self
(either spatially, temporally, or logically) in opposition to the other (and in doing so
delineates a ‘straight’ line of demarcation), the homo-act ‘disorients’ the self/other
binary through its explicit indifference to difference….the homo-act suspends
difference and leads to homo-relationality” (Ellis 6-9).
16
However, the degree to
which Rechy’s novel can be said to support a theory of homo-relationality through
an emphasis on the homo-act is at question because of the conscious suppression of
male-male desire within the hustler world depicted in Rechy’s novel. Thus, the text
literally performs our cultural anxieties about same-sex desire. On the surface, the
homo acts depicted in the novel do not invoke “a desire for the unmediated self of
the other, that is, of sameness for sameness (Ellis 6). Rather, by foregrounding
masculinity and femininity as performances which are bound to each other as
opposites within hetero-relationality’s configuration Rechy opens the possibility of
alternative ways for configuring sexuality. The world depicted in his novel is
populated with characters who occupy a variety of subject positions, often
simultaneously. The lived experiences of these people contest the fantasy of the
ideal American and the American dream. The self/other binary of hetero-
relationality gives way to a pervasive sameness, but it is not the sameness of
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hetero-relationality, through the figuration of a narrator who inhabits both center
and margin.
The Outside and the Elsewhere
Rechy’s narrative provides an instance where the narrator inhabits both
center and margin through his mixed blood status and although born to working-
class parents in a Mexican American community in El Paso, the narrator’s father
wasn’t always working class and the narrator’s own educational background places
him at odds with some of the people within the hustler community itself. As a
result the narrator engages with a series of at time conflicting affiliations. There are
instances when he is an observer of the subculture, viewing it as an outsider.
During these moments he appears to be a product of the dominant culture who has
the mobility to enter and leave various marginal positions but then there are also
moments when he is an active participant in the subculture. The end effect is to
disrupt the normative center/margin boundaries.
To this extent the hustler world inhabited by the narrator provides an
instance where the actual spatialization of center/margin as it pertains to patriarchal
power and as it is inherent in the ordering of urban landscape (Soja 96-7), is a site
where there is a potential remapping of the city as a space of “radical openness” as
bell hooks has suggested.
17
In fact, social geographer Edward Soja goes so far as to
suggest that this type of space is where unorthodox or radical subjectivities can
multiply and connect in poly centric communities of identity and resistance. While
the center city spaces that the hustler and drag communities inhabit in City of Night,
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Times Square in New York City and Pershing Square in Los Angeles, might be
read as cites of containment in that they are spaces to which those subjectivities
that are excluded from dominant culture are relegated, the shifting performances of
the drag queens that inhabit Rechy’s narrative provide an instance in which the
policing effects of the patriarchal culture can be made explicit and thus the threat of
such policing attenuated, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault invokes a similar
dynamic of the visibility of the observer to suggest as well that such spaces of
panoptic observation also become a potential sites for resistance but as within
Foucaultian conceptualizations of power neither the resistance nor the cooptation is
ever complete. In this way the drag queens embody cultural ambiguities
surrounding the effectiveness of surveillance. The following description of
downtown Los Angeles exhibits the effect of patriarchal power structures on
gender behavior as well as the potential for disruption of those same powers:
While the preachers dash out their damning messages, the winos storm
heaven on cheap wine; hungry eyed scores with money...gather about the
head hunting malehustlers...[who] like flitting birds move restlessly about
the park—fugitive hustlers looking for lonely fruits to score from...the
scattered junkies, the smalltime pushers, the teaheads, the sad panhandlers,
the occasional lonely exiled nymphos haunting the entrance to the men’s
head; the tough teenage girls making it with the lost hustlers....And...later at
night...the queens in colorful blouses—dressed as much like women as The
Law allows that particular moment....(245)
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The queens keep moving to avoid the eyes of the law. A few scenes later a fellow
hustler of the narrator’s named Chuck discusses how he learned about hustling
through a representative of the law. Upon arriving in Los Angeles the young man
was questioned by the police for vagrancy: “Sergeant Morgan, hes the one that tole
me what goes on. He took me downstairs, warns me about all the hustling goin on
an everything. An while hes talking and Im saying to him: ‘Nope, not for me’—Im
figurin: Hell, I don know how to do nothin—an I ain never gonna have that
Horse—so, hell, I’ll stick aroun. . . . An here I am, “ he said. He stretches his legs-–
owning the railing: his home, this park (141). While Chuck’s posture and behavior
is typically masculinist in owning the space, the moment is fleeting. In the next line
the narrator discusses the onset of night and the security that the long shadows of
night bring to exiles like Chuck as such brazen displays of ownership and “misuse’
of public space for hustling will not be tolerated in the clear light of day. The
masculine display itself is also underscored as performance further undermining the
regulatory aspects of space. Here the narrator calls attention to the insider/outsider
binary to which these figures are continually constructed as outside the
heteronormative paradigm through vignettes like the above in which the
characterization is one of overwhelming powerlessness yet simultaneously resilient,
adaptive, inventive. Through these characterizations and uses of space, Rechy’s
narrative continually questions divisions between inside and outside: “Gay culture
has always existed within straight culture, unlike the blacks or the Jews or the Irish
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who were literally ‘over there.’ We’ve always been there, just no one’s paid
attention” (Ehrenstein).
Rechy’s characters inhabit the “other” spaces and different geographies as
discussed by cultural critics of spatiality like bell hooks and Edward Soja, in which
fragmentation, ruptures, deviations, displacements, and discontinuites can be
politically transformed from liability and weakness to a potential source of
opportunity. While such a reading of the character of Chuck or even Miss Destiny
might seem naively optimistic, nonetheless as representative characters derived
from the “real-life” experiences of Rechy which, importantly, Rechy asserts in City
of Night was a path he “chose,” reveals the arbitrariness of the hierarchical
divisions governing the dominant culture’s imaginings of center/margin. However,
Rechy’s descriptions of this “vast City of Night come dangerously close to re-
establishing a binary between anarchy and normalcy or what Trinh T. Minh-ha has
called “the anarchy of difference.” She contends that without a certain work of
displacement the margins can easily recomfort the center in good will and
liberalism (120). Similarly, Diana Fuss maintains: “That hierarchical oppositions
always tend toward reestablishing themselves does not mean that they can never be
invaded, interfered with, and critically impaired “(Inside/Out 6). The sheer
pervasiveness of Rechy’s “sexual underground and the figures who populate this
world questions the dominant hierarchies of center/margin, and whether or not
positioning oneself on the inside implies that one has been coopted or that an
outside position is necessarily radical . As Fuss contends,
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The problem, of course, with the inside/outside rhetoric, if it
remains undeconstructed, is that such polemics disguise the fact that
most of us are both inside and outside at the same time. Any
displaced nostalgia for or romanticization of the outside as a
privileged site of radicality immediately gives us away, for in order
to realize the outside we must already be, to some degree,
comfortably on the inside. We really only have the leisure to
idealize the subversive potential of the power of the marginal when
our place of enunciation is quite central. (Inside/Out 5).
Diana Fuss outlines the caution needed and danger involved in choosing
marginality and the need for deconstruction and reconstitution in disordering
difference (Inside/Out 6-8).
Writings that attempt to disorder “dominant configurations of sexuality,”
according to Julia Watson and Biddy Martin, represent lesbian and gay sexuality
“as a transgressive desire and a provocation to heretofore unspeakable connections
and affiliations” (qtd in Ellis 13). In City of Night the narrator’s movements from
sexual encounter to sexual encounter are continually laced with a “recurring panic,
longing for something still vastly undefined” (81). In this way, Rechy seems to
extend Martin’s and Watson’s heretofore unspeakable connections and affiliations
to indefinable ones in that they exist outside conventional representational
practices, but it is fair to say that issues of ethnicity and queer identity complicate
matters beyond any representational dilemmas that might also obtain. This is
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evidenced in two scenes. The first time the limits of conventional representational
practices are revealed occurs when the narrator starts spending time with a young
man who is of the same age as the narrator and who is clearly gay because as the
narrator states “sexually he [Dave] would be attracted only to someone who would
be equally attracted to him, and I sensed, too, that he would look in that person for
more than a night-long partner (216). Although the two are not sexually involved,
the narrator is drawn to Dave; however, the reason why is not made explicit. When
Dave attempts to touch the narrator intimately, the narrator decides he has to leave
and not see Dave again. His response to the shocked look on Dave’s face is to say
“I’m sorry...but this scene is nowhere” (219).
A similar scenario occurs during a scene in which the narrator spends
several days with a john who has momentarily left his wife and children to
contemplate a homosexual lifestyle. The man comments on the gays they watch on
the beach at Santa Monica: “The effeminate ones....With a look, they can make you
feel—so—well—so--...Like youre trapped” (230). A few pages later following an
encounter with a drag queen in a local bar, the same man tells the narrator “I’ve
decided to go back tonight...” (235). These scenes with their emphases on opening
and closing doors give momentary glimpses into what the narrator refers to on the
opening page of the novel as “lives lived out darkly.” Through these scenes, City
of Night suggests that “normative” cultural spaces cannot accommodate multiple
and simultaneous performances. Simultaneously, he foregrounds the difficulty in
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demarcating boundaries “heterosexual” and “homosexual” and all categories of
identity.
Emphasizing instability might easily be read as typically poststructuralist as
some critics have done: “Rechy’s novel avoids making conclusive determinations
about identity; his protagonists’ sexual encounters invariably provide an illusion of
closure that quickly dissipates. His writing continually emphasizes the radical
refusal of resolution or commitment that characterizes the life-style of the gay
subculture of the 1960s and 1970s, declaring that joy is found in the ‘hunt that goes
on endlessly, like the infinitely burgeoning sum of a geometric progression’”
(Christian 25). The description of non-procreative eroticism—endless and non-
utilitarian—here also echoes poststructuralist theory’s critique of the possibility of
conclusive meaning. Teresa de Lauretis’ discussion of the need for a politics of
difference and identity that is multiple rather than unified and one that is located in
the marginality and borderlands of contemporary lived spaces offers a more
nuanced reading of the continuous movement between locations and subject
positions that Rechy charts:
It is a movement between the (represented) discursive space of the
positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off,
the elsewhere, of those discourses....These two kinds of spaces are
neither in opposition to one another or strung along a chain of
signification, but they coexist concurrently and in contradiction. The
movement between them, therefore, is not that of a dialectic, of
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integration, of a combinatory, or of differance, but is the tension of
contradiction, multiplicity, and heteronomy (112).
Accordingly, the first sentence of Rechy’s novel begins “Later I would
think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to
Hollywood Boulevard—Jukebox winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night
fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.” In particular,
Rechy emphasizes a retroactive construction, an attempt to unify the past into a
coherent shape. But Rechy’s words both do and do not achieve this end. The word
“loneliness” on the opening page alludes to the disenfranchised—those who are not
embraced by white middle class America. While suggesting a unifying or fusing of
disparate peoples and elements comprising the disenfranchised/”darkcities,” at least
momentarily, the narrative actually chronicles the disparities even among the
disenfranchised. While in one sentence he unites all disenfranchised, in the next
sentence he emphasizes individual lives and differences: “And I would remember
lives lived out darkly in that vast City of Night, from all-night movies to Beverly
Hills mansions.” Here Rechy’s remembrances raise the question as to what might
constitute the disenfranchised since Beverly Hills mansions seem incongruous with
traditional definitions of the disenfranchised. Linking all-night movie houses with
Beverly Hills mansions and “lives lived out darkly” in the opening sentences also
hints at the extent to which Rechy’s subject matter permeates American Culture. In
depicting such a diverse population he also raises the question as to what extent
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aren’t most “Americans” disenfranchised from the incessant myth of the American
Dream and its ensuing racist and heterosexist behavior codes.
Rechy’s emphasis on cites and locations on the opening page and
throughout the novel again share some traits with spatial feminist literature and
theories by foregrounding the relationships between the body, the self, and the real
and imagined geographies of everyday life. The cityspace depicted within City of
Night is “no longer just dichotomously gendered and sexed, it is literally and
figuratively transgressed with multiple sexual possibilities and pleasures, dangers
and opportunities, that are always both personal and political and, ultimately, never
completely knowable from any singular discursive standpoint” (Soja 113).
As I have tried to demonstrate, Rechy’s concept of identity engages
multiple subject positions simultaneously, positions that often collude, conflict, and
complement one another as opposed to a form of categorization that suggests his
work is solely or specifically gay and Chicano. In City of Night sexual identity is
constituted through the dynamic between the performance(s) and the place(s).
The media coverage of Rechy continues to reflect the problematics of
categorizations in that he both is and isn’t included in the canon of Chicano
literature and gay and lesbian studies. Surprisingly, there is not a lot of criticism on
John Rechy’s work: There are no collected volumes of criticism. Rechy’s
foregrounding of gay issues and identity resulted in the exclusion of his work from
many discussions of Chicano/a fiction. Not surprisingly what criticism does exist
often discusses the conflict over how to classify and categorize the works of John
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Rechy. Does the work fit into the category of Chicano literature, gay and lesbian
literature, etc. Such conflicts suggest that Rechy’s work literally performs
postmodernism’s crisis of category itself by avoiding the imposition of monolithic
models of identity, thus underscoring the instability of all identity categories. The
narrator of City of Night observes that “[f]rom face to face, from room to room,
form bed to bed, the shape of the world I had chosen emerged—clearly but without
defineable meaning. Each morning...the endless resurrection of each new day
began” (120). But at the same time, the instability he advances should not be taken
as an assertion of identity as infinitely fluid. Rather, the discursive process is
haunted by both past and present power relations as revealed through the narrator’s
continual return to the site of childhood through remembered events.
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Chapter 3
Paul Monette and the Typographies of Home
“Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at
all.” Paul Monette begins his autobiography Becoming A Man (1992) by
foregrounding his inability to articulate his difference/his story. Like Capote,
Rechy, and other Gay and Lesbian writers Monette struggles to express himself
both within and against the heterosexual paradigm. And like so many other writers,
Monette’s processes of inscription are haunted by the very paradigm with which he
must grapple and/or attempt to reconfigure. As a young boy and later as a young
man Monette writes of the challenges he faced as he tried to “connect the pieces” of
his straight friends’ and classmates’ life stories as if by sifting through their stories
he might discover how to transition from childhood to adolescence and finally to
adulthood. But as other authors have shown, such conventional trajectories do not
necessarily work for the queer child. For Monette having no story becomes linked
with the closet and a metaphorical death: “For twenty-five years,” he writes, “I
accepted the fact that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would.
That’s how the closet feels, once you’ve made your nest in it and learned to call it
home.”
If home is initially equated with the closet in Monette’s coming-out
narrative Becoming a Man, his works chronicling his adult life, Borrowed Time and
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Last Watch of the Night might be read as an attempt to rework hegemonic
conceptions of home, not so much by exceeding the narrative conventions of home
within the heterosexual matrix, but by constructing narratives that are exceedingly
conventional in depicting the typographies of the suburban home. As Monette notes
in Last Watch of the Night, an AIDS memoir chronicling the death of his lover
Roger, “our life was perhaps too bourgeois for words.” In this way, Monette’s
figuration of home, like Capote’s, becomes a series of rooms and spaces that
accumulate both past and present “queer” and “straight” fantasies of family. But
unlike Capote whose persona and characters were often rendered extraordinary
through their excessive intelligence, or by exceeding the boundaries between child
and adult, sex and gender, Monette inscribes the extraordinary through a figuration
of self that is “extra,” as in excessively, ordinary as the generic title of his coming
out narrative Becoming a Man suggests.
By his own admission Monette’s story is the “ur” text of queer adolescence.
Most gays and lesbians are “aligned at the core if not in the sorry details,” sharing
the same story of narrowly escaping the closet, at least for his generation, all their
stories adding up to the same imprisonment, Monette writes in Becoming a Man.
The intelligence and perceptiveness and the “ventriloquism,” learning how to pass
as straight, as well as the outsider status that are so prevalent in narratives of queer
childhood and adolescence, Monette contends, are part of the “lost years” that
preclude the experience of some “normative” or “authentic” childhood. As with so
many coming-out narratives Monette’s is laced with a melancholic longing for this
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lost childhood, a vision of childhood predicated on a larger cultural fantasy that
repeatedly constructs childhood as a site of “play without restraints.” This
association of the child with unrestrained play is a common recurrence in American
culture as evidenced by the numerous films and novels during the last half of the
twentieth century in which the adult, most often male, reverts to or exhibits
adolescent or child-like behaviors by emphasizing play over work as an escape
from the banalities of the adult world. Childhood as we know it is a social
invention according to some social historians and this emphasis on play is viewed
as an outgrowth of the Romantics emphasis on the child and later the
counterculture movements of the beats and the hippies from the fifties and sixties
that were associated with child-like “play” (Calcutt 84) and an unlimited
exploration of identifications and desires seemingly free of boundaries. Of course,
such utopian treatments of the site of childhood have been widely refuted by both
theorists and cultural critics as well as by the lived experiences of countless others.
Nonetheless, this utopic perception of childhood persists. As critic Angus Gordon
has noted in discursive constructions of adolescence the invocation of an utopic
childhood often masks the extent to which heterosexuality is privileged “except in a
very limited generic field—that of the coming-out narrative—heterosexuality is
installed in advance as the default sexual orientation, the standard denouement.”
Accordingly, the logic of adolescence inscribes same-sex desires, acts, and
identifications as momentary detours in an overarching heterosexual narrative
rather than as indicators of an immanent homosexual orientation (Gordon 7). It
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would seem then that what Monette longs for is a “straight” childhood even though,
ironically, our culture continually constructs the site of childhood as sexually
innocent. As James Kincaid observes, “the child is functional, a malleable part of
our discourse rather than a fixed stage; ‘the child’ is a product of ways of
perceiving, not something that is there” (19). For coming-out narratives like
Monette’s the conflation of this utopic view of childhood with heterosexuality is
important in that it continually denies the adult gay male his childhood (or at least
defers it). It also serves to continually reconstruct the closet. As numerous theorists
of gay and lesbian studies have noted, in order to come “out” of the closet one has
to have been “in” the closet. The act of coming out can become a time associated
with a removing of boundaries and thus a return to this idealized state of childhood
as a site of a free-floating play of desire. It is in the form of the coming-out
narrative that such processes have been repeatedly chronicled. For Monette and
others, coming out in adulthood allows for a return to childhood and a sense of
freedom: “When we laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom,
we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up” (2).
Critics of the coming-out narrative have scrutinized such emancipatory
proclamations, refuting the claim that the act of coming out can constitute a
“singular, redemptive emancipation.”
Conventionally, one comes out of the closet…so we are out
of the closet, but into what? What unbound spatiality? The room, the
den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some
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new enclosure whose door, like Kafka’s door, produces the
expectations of a fresh air and a light of illumination that never
arrives? Curiously, it is the figure of the closet that produces this
expectation, and which guarantees its dissatisfaction. For being
“out” always depends to some extent on being “in”; it gains its
meaning only within that polarity. Hence, being “out” must produce
the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as “out.” In this
sense, outness can only produce a new opacity; and the closet
produces the promise of a disclosure that can, by definition, never
come. (Butler 16).
In addition, both gay and lesbian theorists have critiqued the coming-out
narrative for its emphasis on the discovery of an individual underlying essential
identity, unmarked by other categories of difference, such as race or class. Lisa
Duggan has gone so far as to say that “any gay politics based on the primacy of
sexual identity defined as unitary and ‘essential’ …ultimately represents the view
from the subject position ’20-century Western white gay male’” (Duggan 18,
Making it perfectly Queer). Such a subjectivity is certainly among the problematics
that surface in the works of Paul Monette when he tries to align himself with other
gays and lesbians of what he calls “the tribe.” There is a sense of entitlement to this
new self that emerges in Monette’s coming out narrative and the cultural space this
self should rightfully assume. Earl Jackson, Jr.s observations about skin color and
passing within a homosexual economy succinctly summarizes the white gay males
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increased mobility within a heterosexist society as opposed to those whose subject
positions are more readily marked:
White gay males occupy the peculiar position in a heterosexist
society in that, as men (if they are not “out”), they potentially have
full access to the very power mechanisms that repress them and their
fellow “outsiders,” who cannot “pass,” white women and people of
color of any sexual orientation. Furthermore, gay male sexuality is not
simply condemned by the phallocratic order, but it is also sublimated,
thematized, and fetishized in the phallocracy’s own ambivalent and
constitutive mythographies of the phallus and phallic primacy. While
the “real” of gay male sex is demonized, the imaginary and symbolic
configurations of the unisexuality assumed in phallocentrism, and
sustained by the worship of the phallus in male dominant practices,
finds an unwitting (and disavowed) allay in the gay male. (Jackson,
Strategies of Deviance)
As an “out” gay male Monette’s mobility may be compromised by one set
of oppressions, but, by virtue of his race, he has potential access to positions of
power. It is this latter position that he invokes in his fight against the culture’s
inadequate response to AIDS as for the benefit of all members of his “tribe” in the
long run. After proclaiming this sense of child-like freedom in finally coming out
in adulthood, Monette contends that “...whether or not I was ever a child is matter
of very small moment” (Becoming A Man 2). There are other pressing issues at
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hand for Monette such as the AIDS plague and a culture that is largely still
homophobic: “I don’t come from the past, I come from now, from the cauldron of
the plague” (2) writes Monette. This maneuvering operates as both an avowal and
disavowal of his race and privilege. While Monette’s largely unacknowledged
access to systems of power as a white male may indeed have produced favorable
results in the ongoing war on AIDS, nevertheless, such maneuverings are typical of
the problematics of “whiteness” in literary and cultural analysis. As Richard Dyer
pointed out during the time Monette was writing,
White people…are difficult, if not impossible, to analyze qua
white. The subject seems to fall apart in your hands as soon as you
begin. Any instance of white representation is always immediately
something more specific—Brief Encounter is not about white people,
it is about English middle-class people; The Godfather is not about
white people, it is about Italian American people; but The Color
Purple is about black people, before it is about poor southern US
people. (Dyer 46)
Accordingly, Monette’s subject position as gay white male, as Simon Watney also
noted in the eighties, becomes both the face of AIDS and the fight for AIDS
research and medical advancements.
Both Monette’s elision of race and his contention that in coming out as
adults gays and lesbians become “children for real at last” inform his figuration of
gay identity. For Monette gayness, like the utopic vision of childhood he invests in,
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becomes a transcendent/transgressive signifier but the transcendent moment is
undermined by the spatial typographies in the works which reassert class divisions.
The result is that Monette’s contention of a tribal affiliation that unites all gays and
lesbians like all other identity politics is complicated by the intersections of race,
class, location, etc. as theorists like Susan Stanford Friedman have noted.
One of the surprising effects of AIDS is that it also becomes a site for a
politics of affiliation or perhaps affinity, as Donna Harraway has noted, would be
more appropriate it that the disease transcends the boundaries of gender and
sexuality, as well as those of ethnicity and social class. But how one approaches the
disease and the availability of support services are greatly impacted by one’s race
and class as well as location. The writings of Paul Monette reveal a tension
between spectacle and invisibility in situating the queer body and the queer AIDS
body within iconic images of home and family through an inscription process that
attempts to emphasize a pervasive sameness that transcends boundaries of race,
class, gender and sexuality, but it is a conception predicated on the inherent
self/other binaries of hetero-relationality. The result is a conflation of the AIDS
body with the suburban home whose development is based on exclusionary
practices that emphasize a sameness based on clearly demarcated differences--a
problematic “indifference to difference.” Consequently, while he continually
asserts a politics of affinity both as a gay man and a person with AIDS that is
borderless, the spatial configurations depicted in his writings reinstate these very
same boundaries of race, class, gender and even sexuality. This is evidenced in the
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relationship between the typographies of the suburban home and the AIDS bodies
as depicted throughout Monette’s autobiographical and fictional works, more
specifically the autobiographical works Borrowed Time (1988), Becoming A Man
(1992), Last Watch of the Night (1993) and his novels Halfway Home (1991) and
Afterlife (1990). These works represent a very proflific period in Monette’s life
following the death of his long-time companion, Roger, and chronicling his own
physical and psychological struggle with AIDS and AIDS discourses.
As is the case with Capote and to a lesser extent Rechy, one might say that
for many homosexuals the act of writing one’s memoirs involves writing oneself
out of the dominant order. Monette’s emphasis on the site of home in his works,
his depiction of the AIDS-ridden body, and the concern for control over space and
body they evince correlate with Eve Sedgwick’s contention that the homosexual
experiences an alienation from the ability to describe one’s sexuality (Epistemology
224). Monette’s repeated references in Becoming A Man as to his invisibility and to
the charades he would perform as “court jester” in high school wherein he would be
comedian and go-between for the high school girls and the A-list boys (athletes)
and how ineffective these performances were, for he was inevitably read as
homosexual, also underscores this sense of alienation. The retroactive gesture of
the autobiography or the memoir might then represent an attempt to wrest control
over the description of one’s sexuality.
To this extent, Monette’s choice of the autobiographical mode for Borrowed
Time, Becoming A Man, and Last Watch of the Night might be read as strategic. As
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Deborah Nelson has written in her book Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America,
Monette chose the autobiographical form for his AIDS memoir Borrowed Time
because his experience with AIDS, the book chronicles Monette’s lover Roger’s
“bewildering” fight with AIDS and the “rage and grief” that followed Roger’s
death, left him “morbidly sensitive to invasions of privacy” (141). Particularly
given the epidemiological surveillance of the disease, proposals to quarantine those
infected with the disease, and invasive medical treatments and procedures. AIDS,
Nelson notes, “produced in Monette not autobiography but an autobiographical
tension, a desire for self-expression that was equaled only by the need to protect
against self-revelation” (142). While in response to the AIDS epidemic the ACT-
UP slogan “Silence=Death” provoked a collective coming out of the closet, AIDS
also was returning many to secrecy (Nelson 183). Paradoxically, Nelson writes that
it was not AIDS but Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 Supreme Court decision that
denied gay men the right to privacy that propelled Monette to go public with his
story. The larger argument in Nelson’s book is that while privacy was supposed to
symbolize the autonomy, freedom, self-determination, and repose that the citizens
of a democracy most valued, it became increasingly evident in the confessional
writings of the Cold War period that privacy could also represent isolation,
loneliness, domination, and routine. It was also obvious that these deprivations
were unevenly distributed. Categories of citizens such as women, homosexuals, and
minorities were often banished to the deprivation rather than the liberation of
privacy (x-xiii). To this extent, Nelson’s observations are in line with some activist
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organizations and members of the academic community in proffering skepticism of
privacy as a concept. These critiques attempt to discard the concept as too
intrinsically heterosexist and too dangerously akin to the closet. Monette, she
argues, “discovered that his privacy was to be purchased not through silence, and
not simply through publicity, but through a studied self-disclosure, one that
instructs in the ambiguities of self-representation [it works simultaneously to reveal
and to protect from revelation].” Nelson turns to Monette’s work specifically his
poetry, as a way to think not only about the spectacle of gay visibility in American
culture but also the banalities and fantasies of gay life (147). Nelson’s insightful
discussion of Monette’s poetry and the problematics and choices of self
representation does not discuss the extent to which autobiography is as much about
self-creation as it is about self-reporting. Thus, her chapter on Monette does not
include an analysis of the persona that emerges in his work. In his autobiographical
narratives there is a split between an authentic self (outside the closet) and an
inauthentic self (inside the closet) and a vehement belief that the authentic self can
be retroactively retrieved. For Monette, the retrieval of his authentic self, and the
occupation of a cultural space and/as home is complicated by the ever-
present/omni-present realities of AIDS. “Home” becomes an important site for
Monette precisely because the court’s decision renders the privacy of home
invisible by focusing on homosexual sodomy. The courts decision also limited
privacy rights (the decision was overturned in 2004) to marriage, procreation, and
family. Through the autobiographical form Monette attempts to reconfigure home
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within a gay praxis, by revealing the daily banalities of gay life as well as the
fantasy of a gay marriage (Monette’s and Roger’s) a strategy which supposedly
“works to liberalize our attitude toward homosexuality by presenting bourgeois gay
couples whose love for one another establishes their sameness to bourgeois
heterosexual couples” (Yingling 27). In his landmark essay on AIDS and how the
gay person with AIDS is read and registers in our cultural consciousness, Leo
Bersani offers a critique of “those” gay men who began to feel comfortable about
having unusual or radical ideas about what’s okay in sex, stating that they did so
without modifying their middle-class consciousness (Is the Rectum a Grave 202)
thus perpetuating a hierarchy of acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior even
within a gay and lesbian community. This middle-class consciousness, and its
ensuing hierarchies and binaries, permeates Monette’s works, particularly with
regard to the manner in which he positions Roger and himself within normative
configurations of “home.” By presenting Roger and himself as a bourgeois couple,
Monette plays to a tension between spectacle and invisibility. Lee Edelman
observes that the gay advocate and the enforcer of homophobic norms often share
the same agenda:
Just as outing works to make visible a dimension of social
reality effectively occluded by the assumptions of a heterosexist
ideology, so that ideology, throughout the twentieth century, has
insisted on reading the body as s signifier of sexual orientation.
Heterosexuality has thus been able to reinforce the status of its own
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authority as “natural” …by defining the the straight body against the
“threat” of and “unnatural” homosexuality—a threat the more
effectively mobilized by generating concern about homosexuality’s
unnerving (and strategically manipulable) capacity to “pass,” to
remain invisible, in order to call into being a variety of disciplinary
“knowledges” through which homosexuality might be recognized,
exposed, and ultimately rendered, more ominously invisible once
more. (4)
Paul Monette’s memoir Borrowed Time is perhaps the most well-known
AIDS narrative to date and the first and only, thus far, to become a national
bestseller. At the time of its publication in 1988 critics applauded Monette’s work
for humanizing “for many people….the tragedy of the disease” (qtd in Eisner). As
subsequent critics have noted, the reference to “many people” meant for many
straight people, since at the time of its publication AIDS already had an all too
humanized face for many gays and lesbians and their friends and families (Eisner
2). Critics of Monette have employed the theoretical workings of Douglas Crimp
and Tania Modleski among others to show the pitfalls of writing uncritically within
bourgeois genres such as the melodrama and the romance and how such endeavors
reinscribe the genres’ most traditional conventions which for gay male subjects
ultimately contains and eradicates male-male sexuality (Crimp 248). In line with
these criticisms Monette has often been accused of portraying homosexuals as just
like heterosexuals in an attempt to gain cultural acceptance—a strategy
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emphasizing sameness as opposed to differences. This is most evidenced in the
portrayal of his longing for normality and stable identities as enforced by the
traditional structure of home and family as part of the exceedingly conventional
aspects of his narrative; on the other hand, Monette’s longing for “normalcy” as it
is intertwined with his personal and cultural battle with AIDS and its
representations also highlights the very fragile constructedness of this presumed
normality. In Monette’s case this fragility also extends to identity itself. Home,
body, and self are under constant threat of erasure. While such predicaments are not
the exclusive realm of a gay male with AIDS, Monette’s writings continually
underscore the urgency with which he must tell his story. It is during Roger’s
illness that doctors urge Monette to write about Roger and AIDS: “You have to
write about him, Paul”—was just so much empty advice. Then, it must have been
two weeks later….I had to leave for Boston….I suddenly realized that if the plane
went down tomorrow, there would be no record anywhere of what we’d suffered
and how love got us through”(xvii). And later, as Roger’s illness worsens, he writes
“’We’ll fight it, darling, we’ll beat it, I promise. I won’t let you die.’ The
sentiments merged as they tumbled out. This is the liturgy of bonding. Mostly we
clung to each other, as if time still had the decency to stop when we were entwined.
After all, the whole world was right here in this room’”(77).
Ending on the note of “love” in the above quote, conventionally romantic in
its use suggests what Joseph Boone discusses as the romantic resolution which
leads to reinforcing stability by way of a conservative plot which diminishes any
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disruptive energies that may have been at play, in this instance the homosexual
pairing of Roger and Paul, within a heterosexual framework. The invocation of this
conservative plot structure is part of a larger and continual capitulation
to/dependence on a narrative practice which as Monette evidences is exceedingly
heterosexual. In Monette’s first autobiographical work Borrowed Time (1988) this
invocation of heteronormative paradigms of home is most evident. Throughout the
book references abound to Paul Monette’s home on Kings Road with his lover
Roger, nestled in the Hollywood Hills with pool and city views. The home becomes
a sanctuary for Monette and his freinds in that they form a family of their own. To
this extent the descriptions might be read as a reworking of traditional depictions of
home in that the nuclear family is composed of two gay males and a dog with the
extended family including a number of close gay male friends and several straight
female friends. For example, When Paul and Roger stop going out on Saturday
nights, “Oh, we’re just staying in tonight” (205) it becomes an “inadvertent clue”
that something is wrong. Whereas the family that stays home together on a
Saturday night in suburbia would be read as an act of solidarity and suburban
contentment, for this gay urban couple to stay home on Saturday night suggests
some type of incapacity; however, Monette’s descriptions of his and Roger’s home
life are more concerned with establishing similarities with a traditional family
structure, than reworking or resisting the paradigm, particularly in the way that
Monette assumes the maternal role as he (deals with) the impact of AIDS on his
lover and friends:
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“I realize now how peaceful it was to be writing while Rog lay
asleep in the next room. I can’t describe how safe it made me feel,
how free to work. I think mothers must feel safe like that, when it’s so
late at night you can hear a baby breathe. We had gone along this way
for so many years that when I had to do it for real—watch over him
half the night, wake him and give him pills, run the IV, change his
sweat-soaked pajamas three different times—it never stopped feeling
safe, not when I had him at home. In the deep ultramarine of the
night, nothing could ever go wrong, and nothing ever did” (29).
As Monette suggests, this security he describes is aligned with the fantasy
of home and a sense of control one feels over one’s “home” environment when it is
late at night, the windows and doors are locked, everyone is home and accounted
for and there is no movement. Things are static and therefore safe. The structure of
the family home provides a physical boundary between the occupants of the home
and the outside world as evidenced by Monette’s comforting and idyllic picture of
home. A reliance on the metaphor of home and family infuses the book and
becomes a source of comfort to Paul and his ailing partner Roger: “...the next day
was a good day. Roger was up and around, animated with Bob and Brenda and
loving the closeness of family” (BT 202). In contrast, AIDS becomes the enemy
that threatens this suburban bliss.
For Monette there is a simultaneous fascination and repulsion toward
bourgeios family life. While he despises the politics associated with maintaining
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the heterosexual family unit, nonetheless “home” becomes the site from which he
can attack the AIDS virus: “I think I must have had a certain need to stay close to
the house, now that we had finally been given the house back. I knew how dead
and empty it became when Roger was in the hospital. There was also the matter of
the four-hour rhythm and never wanting to miss the dispensing of AZT” (BT 226).
Home becomes associated with a structure and a rhythm essential to fighting AIDS.
In Last Watch of the Night the two men, the dog and the ritual of their daily walk
become part of this rhythm and structure of home: “I’m not saying it kept Roger
and me together, all on its own, but the evening stroll had about it a Zen calm – so
many steps to the bower of jacarandas at Queens Road, so many steps home” (10).
Because of his disease Roger is forced to let go of his law practice. When
he must close the office he cries to Paul “ But what about all my files” (BT 230).
The files represent the accumulation of his years in California, both his professional
and their common interests. Paul notes that Roger was proud of the range of his
files and their rigorous organization. Metaphorically the dissolution of Roger’s law
practice coincides with the increased need to maintain the order of body and home
in the face of AIDS. After Roger’s demise, Paul notes that he would still come
across Roger’s notes about legal matters when he cleaned out drawers, etc.
“Though they sound like Martian to me,...” (BT 230) Paul writes that he was
amazed at the “concreteness” of them. Roger seems to represent an order and
stability to the home that is now lacking.
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The spatial dynamics and boundaries in Monette’s descriptions of
home as his narrative progresses closely correlate with the uses of boundaries, both
physical and social, intrinsic to the development of the suburban home. The suburb
was first described as an exclusionary, purified social space by Richard Sennet, in
The Uses of Disorder; the dynamics of the North American suburban home has
been examined in some detail by Constance Perin (Belonging in America); and
Mike Davis (City of Quartz) who describes suburban communities as socially
purified and defended fortress-like, against the supposed threat of the poor, which
are an increasingly prominent feature of the geography of cities like Los Angeles,
the city in which Monette and his lover Roger reside. In suburbia, there is a concern
with order, conformity, and social homogeneity with which Monette aligns Roger
and himself and which is secured by strengthening the external boundary. Because
a sense of one’s individual rights are often based on group membership, it is often
felt to be essential to maintain the boundary separating members from strangers by
expelling polluting individuals or symbolic objects (whether they be members of
other ethnic groups, AIDS victims, etc.). Far from being particular to so-called
primitive societies purification rituals are a pervasive feature of contemporary
cultural life (Morley 43)
Despite living in the Hollywood Hills above the city of West Hollywood, a
city within the boundaries of Los Angeles and home to a large population of gays
and lesbians, which might suggest that Monette resides outside the normative
confines of suburbia, his image of home incorporates traditional fantasies of
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suburban stability. Geographers like David Sibley argue that generalizations such
as those by Mike Davis summarized above need to be qualified, because apart from
the increase in racially mixed suburbs in the United States, “it can also be argued
that suburbs provide a refuge for eccentrics” (39) because a concern with privacy
and minding one’s own business is also a characteristic of suburbs. In the early
pages of Becoming A Man, Monette’s descriptions of his childhood home also
allows him some room to experiment. He clumps around the house in his mother’s
high heels and sings and dances on a table for his aunts and family. He is not
directly chastised for such behaviors, at least in his early childhood, but he knows
his behavior is a point of contention between his parents. Similarly, Paul and Roger
initially use the site of home to hide Roger’s illness from certain colleagues and
friends.
As both a child and as an adult the site of home is one of both sanctuary and
potential threat for Monette which is often expressed in his narratives through an
opposition between purity and defilement as discussed in Mary Douglas’s Purity
and Danger. She argues that “uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be
included if a pattern is to be maintained...” By patterning Douglas refers to the
impact a symbolic order whose boundaries are maintained through rituals
associated with separation. These rituals have at their base a categorization of
things as either pure or defiled (41). Sibley argues that her thesis has wider
application beyond the tribal societies she studied, suggesting that her argument
needs to be qualified with regard to time and place and that adherence to rules is
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heightened during times of crisis (38). As Sibley discusses, communities which
much of the time appear to be indifferent to others do occasionally turn against
outsiders, particularly when antagonism is fueled by moral panics: “often panics
concern contested spaces, liminal zones which hostile communities are intent on
eliminating by approaching such spaces for themselves and excluding offending
others”(39). Sibley discusses this as it impacts larger groups but Monette’s
narratives provide an interesting example of how these politics of sameness and
difference are internalized and manifested in the daily maneuverings and
negotiations on both a micro and macro level to one (of many) to whom,
theoretically, the suburbs are not intended—a gay male with AIDS.
Boundary maintenance and consciousness is characteristic of mainstream
American culture as evidenced in the planning, construction, and development of
American cities and suburbs as well as in the way Western culture thinks about and
attempts to maintain a sense of self and a sense of individuality. As Derek Duncan
points out, Monette stands as one of the “representatives of the generation of gay
men who, in the wake of an adolescence of repression, experienced the gay
liberation of the late 1960s and 1970s.” As writers they “treat this fissure between
adolescent repression of sexual identity and the freedom of gay liberation in their
work as they describe the defiant optimism of having come to terms with, and
publicly acknowledged, their homosexuality.” Unfortunately, “for this generation
AIDS shattered that sense of optimism and entitlement” (Duncan 26), as the closet
is replaced by the devastation of AIDS. If Monette equates the closet with home in
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the first half of his life, he breaks that link in his adult life by invoking images of
home as a site from which to fight AIDS. In this way maintaining the boundaries of
the body against the threat of AIDS becomes equated with maintaining the
boundaries of home and self.
The erosion of boundaries is both multiple and various for Monette as he
experiences a loss of control over the representation of his body and self both as a
young boy and as an adult as he encounters the specter of AIDS and its surrounding
discourses. In both instances this process is mediated through the body. In his
coming of age memoir Becoming A Man Monette recalls the two ways in which he
was bodiless. He was a “dweeb at sports” and recalls never understanding the
sexual jokes that males used to bond with one another. The young Monette also
developed an allergic reaction to bee stings. Even as he recounts the event in the
present he is reminded of hiking in the canyons above his Hollywood home and
flailing his arms anytime a bee comes near. As he runs away he is haunted by the
memory of his fellow classmates commenting that he “runs like a girl” (40).
Monette equates these moments with a sense of bodilessness. The bee stings are his
only memory of his body as a young child, except that he was clumsy and lacked
what he called “body English” in comparison to his more physically developed and
agile classmates.
Similarly, as an adult, Monette experiences a struggle and loss over the
control of his body and its representation as the body becomes a catalog of the
manifestations of AIDS. This sense of bodilessness he experienced as a child is
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magnified by the physical effects of AIDS on the body and the inevitable death this
process represents:
These strange plateaus of dying where you bargain away your
dancing days as long as it doesn’t get worse. If that sounds like rank
self-pity, it’s not intentional. I’ve watched this swelling go up and
down for nearly a year now with a certain abstractedness, testing my
body mechanics, still trying to outwit the creep of complications.
Staying in charge, riding my illness as if I was breaking a horse, till
lately anyway. If there is one specific moment when I got it, all my
denial suddenly in tatters, it would be last month in the Canadian
Rockies. (Last Watch 183)
And later when he is on the book publicity tours, etc. his name is always
linked with AIDS: AIDS writer, AIDS activist, AIDS survivor. Although he fosters
the connection through acts of writing and in order to garner public support for
AIDS research, it is increasingly evident that he “couldn’t leave AIDS behind”
(Last Watch 184).
As prominent AIDS theorist and cultural critic, Thomas Yingling, has noted
AIDS work has required the construction of a juridical and social subject
denominated “person with AIDS” in order to receive certain entitlements (funding
for treatment, etc.) and to resist the pressure to read AIDS only as the end of
subjectivity and the loss of personal meaning (26). However, this categorization,
like the terms race, class and sexual identity, as Eve Sedgwick has pointed out,
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barely accounts for or acknowledges the multiplicity of differences within such
categories. There are homeless people as well as people living in very wealthy
neighborhoods who have contracted AIDS. Also there are differences in the way
one contracts the disease, sexually, drug use, etc. Access to treatment drugs, choice
of drugs, and how they are used account for differences among persons with AIDS
as well. Accordingly, “people living successfully with AIDS most often learn that
they cannot escape the medical, juridical, and social category that marks them as
diseased but that their resistance to the potentially negative effects of identification
through AIDS is linked to how much they can refuse AIDS as a totalizing condition
of being. To be able to still be a teacher, student, an actor, a wife, lover, or child, a
Republican or a Democrat, are all essential to a balanced response to diagnosis
(Yingling 26).
Maintaining what Mary Douglas would call “the purity of the self,”
defending the boundaries of the inner body, a never-ending battle against
residues—excrement, dead skin, sweat, and so on, is a battle that has a more
immediate and wider existential significance from the perspective of a person with
AIDS and the constant threat of opportunistic infections. julia kristeva’s reflections
on the pure and defiled in her essay on abjection are particularly helpful in linking
the maintenance of boundaries with the AIDS body, the self, and the suburban
home : “Ecrement and its equivalent (decay, infection, disease, corpse[sic], etc)
stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by non-
ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death” (71). kristeva maintains that
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the impure can never be completely removed: ‘We may call it border; abjection is
above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off
the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be
in perpetual danger (3).
kristeva describes the abject as that which is “opposed to I.” It is “radically
excluded,” yet it is always a presence (2-3). Her view of the abject as some thing,
always there, ‘[hovering] at the borders of the subjects identity, threatening any
sense of coherence with disruption and possible dissolution points to the
importance of anxiety , a desire to expel or to distance oneself from the abject other
as a condition of existence (Gross 103). As such this separation between the self
and the abject other is important in defining our relationships to other cultures and
other people. It also impacts how we order things and can register as anxiety about
peoples and things out of place.
[the abject] is an impossible object, still a part of the subject;
an object the subject strives to expel but which is ineliminable. In
ingesting objects into itself or expelling objects from itself, the
‘subject’ can never be distinct from these ‘objects’. The ingested
objects are neither part of the body nor separate from it (Sibley 8).
As Sibley notes, the urge to make separations, between clean and dirty,
ordered and disordered ‘us’ and ‘them’, that is, to expel the abject, is encouraged in
Western cultures, creating feelings of anxiety because such separations can never
be finally achieved (8). For Monette home becomes a central site from which he
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attempts to maintain a separation between the self and the abject other which
threatens his identity. But as kristeva, Gross, and Sibley note and as the tension
between the purified and the defiled in Monette’s narrative evinces these
separations are never complete. Thomas Yingling has written that because it
provides only negative structures of identification, AIDS is most notable for its
capacity to produce non-identity or internalized abjection (39). In Monette’s
narratives, most specifically in Borrowed Time, the sanctity of home and body is
violated as is the inherent separation of purity and defilement that the fantasy of the
purified space of home is supposed to maintain. More importantly, it is a violation
and disruption of the purified space of home for which Monette feels responsible:
“...as I struggled to figure how I would bear the sentence
[AIDS] myself. Late at night I’d walk in the canyon and think about
Roger watching me suffer. I was already riddled with guilt: None of
this would be happening if I’d never had sex with strangers. I suppose
I felt there was something innately shameful about dying of a venereal
disease. All the self-hating years in the closet were not so far behind
me. And any brand of shame lays one open to the smug triage of the
moralists, whose vision of AIDS as a final closet is clean and efficient
as Buchenwald. (Borrowed Time 32)
Because he believes the source of his and Roger’s AIDS is Monette’s own
“sexual transgressions” which now threaten their home/selves, Monette feels a need
to confess and thus reinstate himself as a moral figure. Here Monette engages with
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what Yingling describes as the normative pattern of redemption in AIDS narratives:
“The finality of AIDS is so overwrought with configurations of cultural anxiety and
dread that its literality must also be continually addressed in strenuous, referential
narratives of victimization, punishment, resistance, and healing” (39).
It is difficult for Monette to move beyond moralizing as regards his sexual
activities. His guilt for having violated the so-called sanctity of home invokes
narrative patterns associated with the stigma of AIDS and other contagious
diseases. In this way he repeatedly surrenders to the normative paradigm of home
and suburbia. As Mike Davis recognizes, “the greater search for conformity, the
greater the search for deviance, for without deviance, there is no self-consciousness
of conformity and vice-versa.” This process is seen by the members of the
community as a virtuous one—it brings into being a morally superior condition to
one where there is mixing because mixing (of social groups and of diverse
activities in space) carries the threat of contamination and a challenge to hegemonic
values (48). Thus, spatial boundaries can equate with moral boundaries. Spatial
separations symbolize a moral order in these communities. To maintain spatial
boundaries and a sense of belonging, it is necessary that Monette locate the source
of his infection elsewhere which in this instance is with the working classes to
which he has been sexually drawn since he was young. In the past, fears about class
were expressed in similar terms.
Contagious diseases like cholera or venereal disease were ‘working-class
diseases’ which threatened the bourgeoisie and threatened to invade bourgeois
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space. Venereal disease, like AIDS, violated personal boundaries. It should be
noted, that the presumed source of infection, the working-class prostitute, was also
an object of desire. Disease, the working class and dirt were closely associated in
nineteenth-century moralizing discourse. More recently, disease, homosexuals, and
Black Africans have been similarly bracketed together. It is important to have
somewhere (else) to locate these threats. It is a necessary distanciation. Thus,
Africa and in the recent past San Francisco have served as convenient depositories
for threatening diseases and diseased others (Sibley 25-26).
Class boundaries within the suburban paradigm can also be maintained
through feelings and sensations associated with the abject—people, things and
places in various combination. kristeva describes a sense of the abject in visceral
terms. Food loathing, she contends, is perhaps the most elementary and most
archaic form of abjection: “When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin surface of
milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—we
experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the
belly” (2). Such sensations can become a part of social experience, however, as
Alain Corbin suggests, historically, the bourgeois self separated itself from the
working-class other through smell or a fear of smell, which returned the bourgeois
to the original source of abjection, defilement associated with bodily residues.
Similar feelings of abjection, he suggests, attach to place, but to understand the
connection between abject things, people and places requires an appreciation of
‘the generalized other’(8-9). Diana Fuss offers a useful and simplified definition of
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“the Other” when she states that “to the extent that identity always contains the
specter of non-identity within it, the subject is always divided and identity is
always purchased at the price of the exclusion of the Other, the repression or
repudiation of non-identity” (49).
These fears of smells and contaminations as associated with a generalized
other manifest themselves in Monette’s work in ways that also reinforce racial
divisions. The neighbors seeping septic tank which Monette refers to as the Ganges
is not without overtones of a generalized other. The leaking tank created a small
stream that would run down the side of the road at certain times of the year.
Monette writes of his fear that the dog had been walking through it everyday and
bringing microbes into the house: “I lapsed into an exponential terror about
infections carried by raw sewage...I had already reached new heights of cleaning,
my rag streaming with ammonia nightly as I wiped every surface” (197). The
reference to the Ganges reinforces an ongoing cultural tendency to associate
disease and contamination with ethnic others and class divisions. This cannot be
happening in the Hollywood Hills, particularly since the owners of the leaking
septic tank are Psychologists who work with AIDS patients. A similar association
emerges when Monette writes that “a doctor friend has warned me never to order
water in a restaurant, or anything with ice, comparing such recklessness to dipping
a cup of water in the Nile (181-2).
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The fear of invasion on both the bodily and psychical levels reaches its
pinnacle as it converges with a fear of the other in The Last Watch of the Night
when Monette writes,
“Because of AIDS the borders have narrowed further and
further, till whole continents are now in the red zone. Forget Africa,
or China or India, the Middle East, any place equatorial. Even when I
was asymtomatic, still juggling a hundred t-cells, I crossed off half the
world for being too dirty. Couldn’t eat the meat or the milk or the
fruit, let alone drink the water. There was something almost
xenophobic in all this, an overcaution that looked at the world through
a glass bubble of paranoia.” (88)
Monette employs a narrative tension between the normalcy of home
inhabited by two gay males and the diseased body as a threat to that normalcy. As
Thomas Yingling and others have noted disease metaphors were also characteristic
of nineteenth century scientific discourses which attempted to support racist myths
with scientific knowledge. Disease, often in combination with other signifiers of
defilement, continues to have a role in defining the self and in the construction of
stereotypes because it threatens the boundaries of personal, local and national space.
These metaphors also foster a fear of dissolution and a projection of this fear of
personal and social disintegration, “onto the world in order to localize it and ...to
domesticate it.” Thus, the “diseased other” has an important role in defining
normality and stability. The fear of infection leads to the “erection of the barricades
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to resist the spread of diseased, polluted others.” The idea of a disease spreading
from a ‘deviant’ or racialized minority to threaten the ‘normal’ majority with
infection has great power as evidenced by the continued anxieties about AIDS,
which serve to reinforce homophobic and racist ideologies—AIDS as the gay
disease, AIDS as the black African disease, etc. (Yingling 4-16)
Monette maintains an ongoing division between the primal, the natural and
the civilized throughout his writings which parallels a division between the
authentic and inauthentic self and an underlying essentialist thrust in his conception
of gay identity. These divisions and this underlying essentialism can be read as part
of the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of
the distinction between subject and object or between self and other in kristeva’s
theorizations of the abject. The abject also refers to a moment in our psychosexual
development which kristeva refers to as a “primal repression,” the moment when
we established a border or separation between human and animal, culture and what
preceded it (kristeva Powers of Horror). This is most evidenced again via the use
of Puck, Roger and Paul’s pet dog. The initial essay in Monette’s Last Watch of the
Night is about the relationships between Puck, Paul and Paul’s lovers following the
death of Roger. After Roger dies, Monette falls in love with and buries another
lover named Stevie. following Stevie he falls in love with Winston. Winston
outlives Monette. Puck has to deal with the loss of two masters as well, “hoping
against hope that Stevie himself would walk in any minute” (Last 20). In Last
Watch of the Night Monette writes that “Puck came to represent the space leftover
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from AIDS” (13). Puck comes to represent the last tie to the “real world” the
“normal one:”
I remember the first time the dog howled, when a line of fire
trucks shrilled up the canyon to try to cut off a brushfire. Puck threw
back his head and gave vent to a call so ancient, so lupine really, that
it seemed to have more in common with the ravening of fire and the
night stalk of predators than with the drowsy life of a house pet...He’d
been seized by a primal hunger, sacred even, and needed to alone with
it (10-11).
This primal instinct is in opposition to Puck’s position as family member.
Perhaps the dog then also represents a return of the primal, a bringing of the outside
in as evidenced by the tracking of the “ganges” into the house and the constant
references to the accumulation of his fur on the couch. Again the sanctity of the
boundary between the outside with its dirt, etc and inside the home is seen as
permeable.
This division between the inside and the outside or the primitive and the
civilized is established early in Becoming a Man. Monette situates his location as a
child geographically and historically in Andover, Massachusetts. In doing so he
emphasizes both the spatial and the temporal. He recounts the tree-lined streets and
picket fences typical of any suburban neighborhood, although at that time Andover
was more of a small town. At the end of the tree-lined streets were woods that
“echoed of the red man’s footfall” (5) Already a division between the primitive and
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the civilized is in place. He discusses the Puritans who settled in the region, the
numerous colonial cemeteries and how Andover is 10 miles west of Salem where
they burned witches whom some suggest were mostly gay and lesbian. He says
there is a Lizzie Borden “in every town in Massachusetts, biding her time and her
axe” (5). The site is a minefield of dead bodies and histories of erasing and
rendering the other invisible. His family moves three times in his early childhood
but the streets are all the same. Maintaining boundaries and the threat of erasure are
instilled at a young age. At one end of town is a junkyard which is off limits for the
young Monette. His mother repeatedly warns the young Monette that if he were to
fall and cut himself on something rusty he could get lockjaw and die.
It seems that Monette must construct his own history and so his works are
also about a search for origins. To this extent, the division between the primitive
and the civilized is inverted in that Monette’s story reveals the hegemonic values
underpinning suburbia and that the constructions inherent to that space do not
obtain for everyone. In Becoming a Man, which was written after Borrowed Time,
the suburbs are the enemy, the enclave of heteronormativity: “the suburban dreck
of ranch house hell in fifteen shades of beige” (192). Outside the suburbs in nature
the “unnatural” acts, as the hegemony labels them, occur for Monette as part of his
“authentic self.” On the edge of town, in the woods, in abandoned barns, in tree
forts, Monette first sexually experiments with boys. And, so, as part of his
teleology, homosexuality is natural, essentialized. He situates its origins in mythic
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time likening his grief over the loss of Roger and subsequent lovers to Hadrian
mourning Antinous as Monette travels the Greek Isles:
…I had a change of emperors, giving credit for the Villa di
Giove to Hadrian rather than Tiberius. That may seem like a minor
glitch, though a century separates their two reigns. But it gave me
leave to populate the pleasure-palace on Capri with Hadrian the
aesthete, the gathering-place for the intellects of his age. And to
remember his passion for Antinous, the joyous comrade of his heart,
who drowned in the Nile in his twentieth year. Temples went up in his
memory, and a hundred sculpted portraits besides, to assuage an
emperor’s grief. (Last Watch 173)
By foregrounding the slippages of memory and substituting mythology for
history which he suggests is just as fictive, Monette’s attempt to present a
retrieveable past—whether Hellenic origins, or an essential identity, or the authentic
portrait of AIDS, is ruptured by the continual performatives of the text.
Like Capote, the trope of the provocative and precocious child haunts the
thematics of Monette’s work. In his quest to retrieve the authentic self, the child is
a sign of ultimate potential—unbound, borderless, a transcendent signifier. In
Monette’s novel Halfway Home, the AIDS ridden 34-year-old central character
finally makes peace with his brother and the memory of his mother in the final year
or so of his life. It is the presence of his 7-year-old nephew who does not seem
afraid of the disease as manifested in his uncle, Tommy the narrator, that propels
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the central character to want to reconcile with his estranged brother. The issues of
security and protection again appear in this novel and coincide with Monette’s
other works—protecting the child from harm and the “other” which is perhaps the
driving force behind the construction of suburbia and certainly echoes the need to
protect the physical body from the intrusion of foreign microbes and bacteria that
can cause havoc in the immune deficient body.
While Halfway Home attacks the conventions and values of suburban
America, the novel’s resolution which advances love and forgiveness as the cure all
once again invokes a conservative plot structure. The central character is in the last
stages of AIDS and has KS. He is very cynical about the world, religion, and love
the result of a combination of factors: being gay, growing up in an abusive family
where his father beat him and his mother was basically an absent/presence (too
afraid of the father herself) and a family wherein his older brother beat him and
picked on him for being queer. The hypocrisy of organized religion is critiqued
throughout the novel as well, particularly through the performance artist piece
“Miss Jesus” that the central character has developed. The presence of the nephew
invokes shame in the central character for his diseased state. For a time he wants to
cover his body even though he has boldly displayed his KS legions to his brother
and others.. Although this character and by extension Monette in his own life
oppose the confining and stifling aspects of the contemporary American family, the
nephews presence invokes both maternal and paternal instincts in the central
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character. He doesn’t want this child to have the same type of life that he
experienced:
Daniel looked at me over his father’s shoulder, his own face
composed and patient, what the Irish call long-suffering. Something
close to irony passed between us, how far removed from the ruckus
and upheaval that his parents lived on, just as mine had. He was a
keeper of secrets like me, innocuous and seemingly impassive, biding
his time till he could be free. (174)
The boy’s mother is very religious (catholic) and tells the central character
that she doesn’t or that “we don’t approve of your lifestyle.” Here again Monette
invokes a utpoic vision of childhood. The boy or any child for that matter is
innocent, open, without boundaries, and loving but learns to hate through the adults
as part of the heterosexual matrix. Tommy remarks to himself that it must have
killed her not to have access to a phone in the beach house so that she could
connect with her “suburban mommy friends.” His encounter with his sister-in-law
evokes a memory of his own mother: “...my mother, futile and helpless, ironing and
vacuuming, desperate to make some order before the old man came careening
home: “The wrong people had all the babies,” the narrator thinks to himself (111).
The child is patterned after the wonder boy figure in his intelligence and all
knowingness. In this way, the child is like the young Monette and the central
character in the novel sees the young boy as a version of himself, specifically by
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the way he is able to tune things out and sit with his nose in a book amidst all the
commotion:
In Halfway Home Monette again invokes the spatial dynamics of an us/them
binary which invokes racial and class divisions. At his theatre group AGORA
where he used to perform a piece called “Miss Jesus” he talks about how the theatre
was always picketed by church groups from Pacoima which is a suburb of Los
Angeles located in the middle-class suburban enclave known as “the valley.”
However, while the general perception of the area is one of conservative middle
class values, the area is actually very lower and working class and largely hispanic.
He also locates the protestors in Sacramento. The problem comes form the edges
and outside the city itself, again always positing an elsewhere. While the
performance piece “Miss Jesus” critiques the hyprocisy in religion and the piece
presents the christ figure as androgynous and sexually transgressive, the book itself
is largely about love and redemption, learning how to forgive. And it is over the
child that this act of forgiveness between the two brothers, Tommy and Brian, can
take place.
The depiction of Tommy’s sister-in-law who seems to be the harbinger of
societal and religious norms of apporpriate and inappropriate behavior is not unlike
the depiction of Monette’s own mother in his autobiographical work Becoming A
Man. When he brings his sexual activities into the home, he is caught by his mother
who suddenly opens the young Monette’s bedroom door catching him and his
childhood friend in the dark with their pants down. Her inquiry about the incident
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weeks later “What were you boys doing?” (28) haunts Monette into adulthood.
Suburbia increasingly becomes equated with the policing effects of the nuclear
family roles in Becoming A Man. Later, when he would try to talk politics at the
dinner table after he began attending Yale, the young Monette was acutely aware
that his mother was not buying the politics angle. Inevitably
“...she’d ask, innocent as a child picking at a scab: What girls
was I dating at Yale, and when was she going to meet Star [a
girlfriend form Yale] My mother’s subtext had to do with shaming me
back to the straight and narrow by letting me know she had my
number. Her dread at having produced a homo son was shaped by her
own wounded narcissism: How could I do this to her, she always
seemed to be saying” (183).
Earlier in this memoir he looks at the retelling of his childhood for traces of
the much maligned Mama’s boy.
Two sick queens who hunted us down when I was too young
to know—Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover—were given free rein by
the Red Scare delirium; they flushed out queers and wrecked lives to
throw the scent off their own ravening desire. Cardinal Spellman
being the third member of the homo death squad, postwar division.
Three little closeted mama’s boys, ensuring that the Aryan dream of
elimination would continue.
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Mama’s boy. The evidence of 116 High Street suggests as
much, but it’s still hearsay” (7).
And then he remembers the first day of school and anxiously waiting for his
mother to pick him up. Yet in retrospect he seems to believe that he has fantasized
any closeness with his mother. When he is forty and his mother is sixty and on
oxygen due to ephysema, he recalls his mother saying “I wish we’d watched more
sunsets together” (8). Several paragraphs later, Monette ends this particular
recollection of his mother by saying that his mother always liked to set the record
“straight” (8).
Michael DuPlessis writes that the very grammar of the term “Mother’s boy”
enacts a Freudian scenario in which the possessive apostrophe denotes both the
boy’s identification with his mother and her possessiveness: the perfect
arrangement, according to psychoanalytic wisdom, for homosexual sons. The
phrase “mother’s boy” hides an “implicit and implacable future anterior in which
the boy who is now too dependent on his mother will already have become, indeed
will always have been, a failed version of that mother “(146). While in Becoming a
Man, which was written after Borrowed Time, Monette questions the amount of
time he spent with his mother, in Borrowed Time he likens his own obsessive
behavior about the house and microbes with his mother burying herself in her
housework--it is a failed version. Monette’s attempts at distancing himself from the
figure of the mother as an embodiment of hegemonic values is undermined by his
reliance on a narrative structure that is exceedingly heterosexual. His work
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continually returns to this primal scene as a point of demarcation that is constantly
eroding. kristeva’s definition of the abject, as noted earlier, is also about primal
repression, the moment of separation from the mother when we recognize a
boundary between self and other. But as his narrative evinces these boundaries and
points of separation are never complete.
Monette’s is a search for home, home as origins and authenticity. But
during the course of the autobiographies, the presumed linear movement of
revelation is disrupted by AIDS. In fact, the books are written recursively.
Becoming a Man is written after Borrowed Time. Yingling discusses the ways in
which AIDS impacts our thinking about the subject. The question he pursues turns
on how the American feeling for the body inscribes disease as foreign and allows
AIDS to be read therefore as anti-American. Wittgenstein’s journal entry, he writes,
reminds us that the subject’s self-relation is mediated, requiring us either to forgo
rhetoric of a “Me” distinct from a “Not Me” or to open the term to a semiotic or
dialectical reading (14 ). This would seem to be the impact of recent gay and
lesbian theory as well, which has instructed us to question the very paradigm of
identity that has allowed gays and lesbians to self-identify: Ed Cohen among others
has written about the screen of sameness that underwrites the “we” of gay and
lesbian political discourse, questioning how the categories of identity politics
operate on an exclusionary principle similar to that which minority peoples have
always had to work against and that imagines some essential condition of being
signifiable as gay, lesbian, etc. (qtd in Yingling). In Monette’s narratives AIDS is
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the arbiter of identity but any “authentic portrait of AIDS” is ruptured by the
continual performatives of the text.
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Chapter 4
Escape to Queer Mountain:
Siegfried & Roy, Queer Adolescence and the Cultural Imaginary
The press coverage following the October 3, 2003 attack on Roy Horn of
the Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy by one of his pet tigers questioned the
use, treatment and plausibility of using wild animals in entertainment venues. In its
aftermath, several versions of the attack began to circulate. According to some
audience members the tiger refused a command to lie down and then clamped its
jaw on Horn’s right arm. In this version, Horn repeatedly struck the animal’s head
with a microphone at which time the tiger lunged at Horn, clamping its jaws around
his neck and dragging him backstage. The version told by Siegfried Fischbach and
later Roy himself following the attack was one that emphasized the tight bond
between Roy and the tigers—a narrative that relied heavily on the metaphor of
family.
Accordingly, the tiger was said to have been protecting Roy, dragging him
to safety as one would a child or a sibling or given the manner in which Roy,
Siegfried and the tigers are depicted, a child aiding a parent in a moment of crisis.
Roy was said to have passed out on stage, a reaction to his high blood pressure
medication. The tiger, Montecore, then grabbed Roy by the neck and dragged him
back stage to safety, accidentally severing an artery in the process. This metaphor
of family that the entertainers invoke repeatedly is echoed in the publicity
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photographs of Roy, Siegfried, and their white tigers. Photographs of children at
play with their parents along with the more formal and posed arrangement of “the
family portrait.” One image that is continually replayed in the press coverage and
documentaries on cable channels such as A&E and “E,” the Entertainment
Channel, is one in which a white tiger leaps through a large silk screen image of
Roy, emerging from the area of Roy’s stomach onto the stage.
The repetition of such images, along with the frequent clips of the tigers
freely roaming the interior rooms and exterior grounds of Siegfried and Roy’s
“jungle palace” in the Nevada desert, reinforces the closeness of familial bonds
between Roy, Siegfried, and the tigers. This emphasis on family often affects how
the relationship between Siegfried and Roy is viewed. At a screening of the Vegas
entertainer's Siegfried and Roy's 3-D Imax film The Magic Box which was released
in fall 1999 I heard one older man tell the woman next to him that Siegfried and
Roy were brothers this despite the fact that the film depicts separate childhood
homes for the two. A Month later I even had a professor on my dissertation
committee ask if indeed Siegfried and Roy were brothers. I cite these inquiries
because I am interested in exploring the way in which metaphors of family and
home inform the representations of Siegfried and Roy and how these tropes of
recognition engage with conceptions of homosexuality.
The performances of the Vegas entertainers Siegfried & Roy (and the figure
of the magician) represent a site for elucidating the relationship between the spatial
and queer performativity. The repeated imagery of containment and escape via the
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trope of the magician suggests a special relationship to the space inhabited by
Siegfried and Roy and the construction of the queer adolescent. If as I contend the
bases for Siegfried and Roy's performances are conceptions of home (the narrative
of the stage performance is to save the world from the evil goddess and return Roy
to home) because of its inherent heteronormative sex-gender alignments, that space
of home is in constant need of reconfiguring. As such the spatial representations of
home in their stage performances and the 3-D Imax film can be read in line with
other queer narratives as a way to escape and then re-articulate the confines of
traditional depictions of home and family.
The Magic Box chronicles the entertainers' lives through images that shift
between present day performances and subsequent narrative reconstructions of their
childhood. Siegfried opens the film with the admonition that "Magic brings back
the child within us. We are born in wonderment but time diminishes the light and
so we must return to the child to regain this sense of wonderment" (The Magic Box
1999). Through the construction of the film and stage performances Siegfried and
Roy attempt to return to this child within by exceeding the spatial confines of the
stage. There is a need to define themselves in excess of that space, as extraordinary,
via the costumes, exploding boxes, flights across the auditorium on a wire,
disappearances from the stage and reappearances mid-audience that work directly
in relation to what are depicted as the dark and confining spaces of their childhood
homes and the oppressive masculinity of war-torn Germany. Perhaps more than
representations of straight adolescence which both function within and reinforce a
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heteronormative matrix (footnote Butler), the narrative of queer adolescence
because of the pervasiveness of this matrix is seemingly more conscious about
reconfiguring space.
The practice of re-appropriating various spatial structures and using them
for purposes other than those for which they were intended is common in queer art
and is well documented by theorists and historians within the field of Gay and
Lesbian/Queer studies (see Michael Moon’s A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and
Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol, George
Chauncey’s Gay New York and Aaron Betsky’s Building Sex and Queers In Space).
While a number of these works focus on the uses of public space, the "site of
home" is a recurring structure in narratives of queer adolescence as the protagonists
attempt to reconcile their queerness within a structure that is designed to enforce
heteronormativity.
“Home” can be both a space of sanctuary for some queer adolescents in that
they are in the presence of caring siblings and/or parents and the perceived privacy
of the bedroom in which they can close the door and behave in ways that might be
at variance with sex-gender alignments. But “home” can also be a site of threat and
constant surveillance. Parents and siblings can open the bedroom door at any
moment. Behaviors, tastes (television programs, movies, music selections) are open
to criticism from other family members and friends and pose the threat of
revelation for the child whose tastes are at too great a variance with those culturally
prescribed for his or her gender. The result is often a tension between home as
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sanctuary and home as threat. For Siegfried and Roy this tension is played out
between the site of home as a repressive inhibiting construct and the site of
childhood itself as an unproblematic “utopian site of free-floating liminal
exploration” (Gordon 7). It is the physical confines of home from which they must
escape and the fantasy of childhood as a site of non-binding exploration of
identities and desires with which they must engage.
Despite the cultural cliche that says once you leave home you can never go
back, Siegfried and Roy’s performances (the present-day footage in The Magic Box
and their stage show in Vegas are the same) suggest you can return home; the mise
en scene of their stage performances and film continually evokes the primary and
perhaps narratively primal scenes associated with home. The visual representations
of their childhood homes in war torn Germany are dark and monochromatic as
compared to the ornate and colorfully spectacularized stage performances. Both
Roy and Siegfried are depicted as children of dysfunctional families. In one scene
a young Roy looks longingly out the window of his childhood home with his dog
Hexa at his side. The interior is dark except for the light shining through the
window and onto the young Roy and his dog. No family members are present.
However, quarreling voices can be heard in the background. The voiceover states
that fights were frequent and there was seldom peace while Roy states that as a
child’ “[m]y idea was to run away from home.” Both Siegfried and Roy turn to
nature for guidance and learning. Roy roams the meadows and forests of Germany
with his dog at his side. Siegfried climbs mountain tops where he spends his days
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away from home “searching within himself for the way to dream of a better
life...[and]looking beyond the realities of life to a place of magic” (The Magic Box).
For Siegfried and Roy magic is linked with the mysteries of nature, a way to
understand the machinations of the universe. Magic offers Siegfried answers and
functions as a surrogate parent for him since his parents are portrayed as
dysfunctional. For Roy the pivotal moment in his childhood is one in which his dog
Hexa saves him from drowning in quicksand by bringing a farmer to his rescue.
While in Freud’s scheme the primal scene is the traumatically anxious and
frightening one of the infant’s or small child’s observing or hearing the sights and
sounds of adults engaged in sexual acts (7), Roy seems to rework the primal scene
in his narrative as a moment of connection with nature and seemingly an
understanding of the larger machinations of the universe, a reworking that links
childhood with a pre-cultural state. In a voiceover he states that “animals have an
emotional language that we can connect with when we are absolutely in the
moment with them.” The scene also functions as a screen memory of sorts, a scene
first theorized by Freud that draws on actual figures and events from ones
experience but one which may also incorporate imaginary and symbolic elements
that become retroactively charged with a set of meanings that simultaneously mask
and reveal a network of formative perceptions and fantasies from and about one’s
early life (Moon 98). Viewed this way, perhaps Roy’s emerging from the
quicksand, aided by his dog Hexa, symbolically represents his rebirth, a fantasy of
being autochthonous or being able to do without the mother who is often depicted
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even in queer narratives as the embodiment of normative culture and that which
must be escaped; or, given the emphasis on his ability to communicate with
animals, the scene also implies a rejection of the mother tongue. Roy as the child of
nature is extraordinary in that he can communicate with animals. He has entered a
world with an alternative discourse. Thanks to Hexa he escapes the dark engulfing
quicksand which metaphorically equates with the dark confining heteronormative
spaces of his childhood.
This narrative sequence in The Magic Box wherein Roy’s dog Hexa saves
him is remarkably similar to the narrative Siegfried and Roy began to circulate
following Montecore’s attack on Roy in October 2003 in which Montecore was
said to have accidentally injured Roy in the process of attempting to protect him. In
addition to engaging the metaphor of family Siegfried and Roy’s retelling of the
attack also foregrounds the function of magic both in the show and in their lives.
One of the principles of magic relies on the use of misdirection, directing the
audience’s focus and attention away from the actual sleight of hand or “secret
move” and toward some other action on stage (footnote). Of course, the same
process might be said to apply to all acts of storytelling particularly when
constructing autobiographically informed pieces in that one chooses specific events
etc. to highlight at the expense of other versions and events that might provide a
different reading. That is not to say that Siegfried and Roy’s retelling of their
childhood relies on the principle of misdirection in steering the viewer away from
the as yet unrevealed real or “secret story” which could easily be read as a futile
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attempt at closeting their sexuality when one could just as easily read their
sexuality in line with D.A Miller’s theorizations of the “open secret” (footnote),
but it does foreground the narrative pattern they choose.
While Siegfried and Roy never self-identify as gay in this film or in their
public life in general, nonetheless their story shares traits with gay and lesbian
narratives. Since the folk beliefs about gender and sexuality that are continually
quantified in psychological research often reappear as narrative elements through
which gay and lesbian identity is expressed (Probyn 33). In thus reconstructing
their lives the film incorporates larger cultural patterns for representing
adolescence. Like all coming of age narratives the trajectory in The Magic Box is
about finding one's true calling in life; however, in Siegfried and Roy's narrative,
not surprisingly, sexuality is unremarked. As such it becomes yet another instance
in which the weight of the unspoken would seem to return via the mise en scene
(Nowell-Smith), particularly by way of the continual framing of Siegfried and Roy
as a pair if not a couple. However, the question of their sexuality is continually
deferred throughout the film as well as in the stage performances of Siegfried and
Roy through a series of narrative and visual techniques that conflate the adult
Siegfried and Roy with a mythical state of childhood innocence.
As depicted in The Magic Box, Siegfried like Roy, as a child, has a
fascination though not with animals but with Magician's boxes, the ones with
mirrors in the interior that are used to present the illusion of disappearance. The
continuous juxtapositioning of the past and present, the repeated use of mirrors and
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boxes suggest a return to the site of the symbolic gaze (footnote) which is
underscored by their stage performances in which Roy is cut in half, handcuffed,
shackled and thrown in a box from which he disappears but, of course, always
reappearing intact. The effect is one that collapses time by merging the present day
Magicians with their younger selves. This is also emphasized in both the opening
and closing sequences of the film in which Siegfried and Roy are framed with the
younger versions of themselves. The film then attempts to explain the behaviors of
Siegfried and Roy as solely concerned with maintaining a sense of child-like
wonderment about the world. They are not gay--they are just child-like.
Another way in which they maintain a sense of the child about them is by
playing to the viewers sympathies by occupying the position of the orphan.
Although both men come from traditional two-parent families, the families are not
really “there” for the men. It seems that for Siegfried and Roy they are always
already outside the normative conventions of home and family. As noted, Roy’s is
conspicuously absent and Siegfried’s is dysfunctional. The narrative trajectory then
is about filling this void or rectifying the situation. The voiceover states that
Siegfried’s journey forced him to face his greatest fears which in this instance
becomes the stoic masculinity that his father represents. Within the frames
depicting Siegfried's childhood the mother is always positioned in the background,
usually washing the dishes with her back turned away from the rest of the family
while the father sits sullenly in a chair. The young Siegfried enters the scene with
the idea of showing his first magic trick to his father. Siegfried performs a
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disappearing act using a penny--a feat that brings a smile to his father's face. For a
moment, Siegfried says in a voiceover, “Magic had broken the spell. I saw in my
father the wonder of a child.” And so, magic becomes the vehicle by which
Siegfried can resurrect the child within his father, if only momentarily. However
brief, it is a story about the relationship between a boy and his father. It is this
child who breaks his father's stoic masculinity. Siegfried’s revisiting his childhood
is significant in that it defines the constricting masculinity from which he must
liberate his father and from which he himself must escape. The relationship with
his mother, however, is never explored. Given the pernicious and persistant
propensity for queer boys to be read as “Mama's boys” (see Duplesis) and for
mothers to be “blamed” for their son’s homosexuality this absent narrative may be
an intentional oversight. Young boys without fathers or those with dysfunctional
fathers who subsequently cause these young boys to spend too much time with their
mothers are more likely, so this theory goes, to exhibit cross gender characteristics
and by extension become homosexuals.
In her essay "Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary,
" Biddy Martin notes that many novels that attempt to represent gay and lesbian
subjectivities, here she specifically discusses Aimee Duc's 1901 novel, Are They
Women, "shift from an initial celebration of cosmopolitan rootlessness and
alternative affiliations to what becomes an ultimately melancholic longing for
attachments that recapitulate identification with home, family, and nation" (55).
While Siegfried and Roy’s narrative is not openly about a gay subjectivity nor does
144
it celebrate a cosmopolitan rootlessness so much as it depicts a search for origins,
nonetheless their narrative does share some of the characteristics Martin describes.
In light of Martin's observations that these narratives which celebrate cosmopolitan
rootlessness are usually accompanied by a melancholic longing for home, Siegfried
and Roy's film might be read not so much as a chronicle of their
"extraordinariness" but an inscription of their "extra" ordinariness. Their life stories
readily fit into larger, culturally recognized narrative patterns of childhood and
citizenship within capitalist culture. They rose from humble beginnings to amass a
fortune, in essence supporting the cliché of the successful immigrant as well as
their emphasis on childhood and family readily play to the resurgence of family
values throughout the nineties and even today.
While the segments that narrate their childhood in Germany focus on
escaping their home lives, the present day footage and stage performances reinstate
the family. The show is structured around a narrative in which Roy saves the world
from the evil goddess during which there are numerous magic acts. In the film
version after the young Siegfried performs his first magic trick for his father, the
two gaze into the fire place as the scene morphs into present day footage of
Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas stage show. The voiceover states that the monstrous
war that had gripped their families and that had crushed their fathers gave Siegfried
and Roy a taste for freedom—“the freedom that is necessary for anyone to master
their own destiny.” The giant fire-breathing mechanical dragon that dominates that
stage is equated with the terror and oppressiveness of WWII Germany. Marching
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soldiers in beautiful golden armor fill the stage. While earlier the evil goddess, who
is also aligned with the dragon and soldiers, captures Roy. With the help of
Siegfried’s magic, he later escapes and destroys her. She vanishes in a flash of
flames to be replaced by a white tiger. The next shot in the film version shows Roy
flying around the auditorium suspended by a wire in Cirque du Soliel fashion while
his and Siegfried’s laughter echoes throughout the auditorium like children at play,
a refrain throughout the film and stage performances. The dark auditorium with pin
lights on the ceiling gives the illusion of the infinite sky at night. In opposition to
the regimented marching of the soldiers, Roy is literally and figuratively unbound.
While he momentarily transcends the spatial confines of the stage, the shows
narrative is about returning/finding home. Magic works well within this search for
home because both the film and stage performances are really about
transformations.
While the larger narrative structure is about transforming back to a child,
the actual magic acts continually transform Roy and Siegfried. At times Roy will
enter a cage or a box on stage and with a few waves of Siegfried’s wand Roy is
replaced by a white tiger. At other times Roy disappears to be replaced by Siegfried
and vice versa. The result is that Roy, Siegfried, and the White tigers become
synonymous with one another. This pairing or grouping is also echoed in The
Magic Box where in one segment Roy befriends a Cheetah at the Munich Zoo and
even sleeps in the cage with the animal. As with his dog Hexa, he learns to
communicate with Chico the Cheetah, eventually adopting Chico and somehow
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smuggling the cat on board a cruise ship where Roy meets Siegfried. The
conflating and interchanging of Roy and Siegfried at moments in the show ( I will
discuss the inclusion of the White Tigers shortly) is yet another instance in which
homoerotics emerges.
As Leo Bersani has noted desire to have is never entirely distinct from the
desire to be and that boundaries between having and being are more blurred in
same-gender desire (63). Accordingly, the pairing of Siegfried and Roy might be
read as a pastiche on the distinction between having and being. The similarities
between the two are so extreme/excessive that desire may not obtain. Primarily,
they are identified jointly as “Siegfried and Roy.” It would be fair to say that most
people do not know the last names of Siegfried and Roy and many people do not
know which one is Roy and which one is Siegfried. While Siegfried and Roy never
identify as gay, for many viewers, their demographics mirrors the diversity of
tourists in Las Vegas, the simple pairing of two adult men can/will be read as a
homosexual pairing. At the same time the excessiveness of the pairing, both in
physical appearance (hair styles, theatrical clothing, etc.) and the volume of
publicity that has made their names synonymous with Las Vegas, also has the
potential to erase such readings. The excessiveness becomes part of the spectacle
that is Las Vegas.
While the magical acts tend to conflate Roy, Siegfried and the Tigers, there
are other instances in the stage show that break or even counter these continuous
pairings. At one point in the program, there is one long break in the action during
147
which Siegfried performs a magic routine in a more old-fashioned style where he
directly addresses the audience and even has a volunteer from the audience come
onto the stage to help him perform a series of rope tricks. During this part of the
show Siegfried plays the stereotypical straight male simultaneously laughing at and
comforting the hysterical female who is overwhelmed at the prospect of being on
stage with Siegfried. At the end of this segment he says and now let's return to the
story and see how Roy is doing.
There is also a second point during the show where the action is stopped
and Roy and Siegfried directly address the audience. During this segment Roy does
most of the talking which in this instance is about their efforts to preserve the white
tiger and how they became involved with this project. Their preservation efforts are
based on the premise that these white tigers (they are also trying to preserve white
lions) are a distinct species that will become extinct without Siegfried and Roy’s
conservation efforts. This premise is one that has been widely refuted. The
biological evidence suggests that the white tigers are a biological fluke or mutation
and not a separate breed or species as Siegfried and Roy contend. Keeping in mind
that Siegfried and Roy never identify as gay, nonetheless, their association with the
white tigers and at times conflation with the tigers, once again, bears an uncanny
resemblance to the problematics of queer identity politics. The plight of these tigers
reads as a code for inscribing difference. Specifically, I mean that Siegfried and
Roy’s claims to a separate identity for these white tigers and lions parallels the
148
problematics of gay and lesbian literature that often becomes entangled in binary
oppositions between constructivist and essentialist viewpoints.
Siegfried and Roy’s refrain throughout The Magic Box is that everyone
must find their true calling which is equated with finding or creating a sense of
home. Similarly, their long-term objective is to return these white tigers to their
homeland. But home for Siegfried and Roy increasingly becomes dependent on
inscribing and maintaining an essential difference. As Diana Fuss remarks: “[i]n
both gay and lesbian literature, a familiar tension emerges between a view of
identity as that which is always there (but has been buried under layers of cultural
repression) and that which has never been socially permitted (but remains to be
formed, created, or achieved)” (100). In light of her words, Lesbian and Gay
autobiography can be viewed as constructionist to the extent that it seeks to
produce a gay identity. But its underlying thrust is essentialist, since identity is not
created but is instead realized through the actualization of a potential essence
During the preservation sequence Roy brings out one of the tigers and
shows a video of the tigers’ homeland in Africa and then of Roy and the tigers at
home in his and Siegfried's Las Vegas mansion. (It is at this point in the show
where Roy was attacked by Montecore) The shots are of Roy and the Tigers
frolicking in meadows, swimming in the pool, Roy riding on the back of one of the
tigers and Roy in bed with one of the tigers surrounded by several hundred candles.
Sequentially the shots move from looking like those of children playing, to a father
and his children and finally to more erotic shots. Nonetheless, these glimpses into
149
the private lives of Siegfried and Roy become moments of connection for the
audience as the men and their tigers function as a form of family.
This melancholic longing for home and family is also repeated in the
publicity and media representations surrounding Siegfried and Roy. For example,
In an Arts and Entertainment channel Biography on the pair that first aired In the
Spring of 2000, there have been several re-edited versions of this biographical
piece in the intervening years, there is a segment on the kidnapping of one of their
White tigers In New York just before they were to appear on a local morning news
program. The tiger was in the back of a rental truck that was stolen from in front of
the studio. The drama is told in a serious tone with documentary footage and
interviews with the mayor of New York (Ed Koch) and the New York police
during the two-hour ordeal. Interspersed are interviews with the distraught
parent/Roy who is frantic and near tears over the disappearance of one of his tigers.
The depictions allow the viewer to become interpolated into the drama via
the metaphor of the family. We sympathize with Roy's loss and await the reuniting
of his family. The questions and footage accompanying the news segment resemble
the frequent news interviews with parents of abducted or lost children, a type of
coverage that has increased in recent years. During the segment Siegfried, for the
most part, is conspicuously absent from the camera frame although he is
interviewed about the incident for the A&E biography which was filmed in
retrospect. In the few frames in which he does appear he is in the background. Roy
does the talking and displays maternal characteristics, while Siegfried plays the part
150
of the stoic male. In general, however, not unlike typical family portraits the two
are framed together with their tigers in their publicity stills. While the framing of
the photos pairs the two males, the format -- that of the family portrait -- may be a
point of connection and familiarity with their audience. Until it was removed in
2004, following Roy’s accident and the closing of the Siegfried and Roy show, a
large thirty by fifty foot photo appeared on the marquee outside the Mirage. The
photo/marquee dominated the front of the Mirage and could be seen from several
miles away as one drove down Las Vegas Blvd despite the plethora of other signs
along the route, mega hotels, theme parks, and millions of lights. The look of
Siegfried and Roy in the photo was extreme in its construction. The faces looked
airbrushed and even surgically altered. The effect was one of wearing masks. Yet
the photos did not seem at odds with the other moments of excess along Las Vegas
Blvd. The marquee was also a popular site for tourist photographs. Numerous
straight couples, honeymooners, and even the occasional gay couple were
photographed in front of the mirage with the marquee containing the portrait of
Siegfried and Roy in the background. And so their photo enters the homes and
family photo albums of vacationers and visitors to Las Vegas.
The cite of Las Vegas as Siegfried and Roy’s home and work (they
performed both an afternoon and evening show four to five days a week at the
Mirage until Roy’s accident) is significant in respect to re-configuring space with
the constant demolition and reconstruction of the city as fantasy play land for
adults. S&R became regular performers at the newly opened Mirage in 1990. At
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the time Las Vegas was beginning to lose customers to gambling establishments in
other states. In response Las Vegas changed its image to appeal to the entire
family. Circus hotel and casino was the forerunner of this idea but the Mirage was
the first mega-hotel and the Siegfried and Roy show although a cabaret act was
conceived to appeal to the entire family. Las Vegas changed its image from a hang
out for the brat pack and late night partying to one that supported and affirmed the
family structure (in the last several years Las Vegas has begun catering to a young
twenty-something crowd). Queers, white tigers and "assorted freaks" become part
of the capitalistic mechanizations of the city of Las Vegas. They are
spectacularized for family viewing. As such Las Vegas functions as a site of
containment in that Siegfried and Roy’s “queerness” fits into the spectacle that is
Las Vegas.
Eve Sedgwick's theoretical work on the construction of homosexuality is
useful here. She traces the increased centrality of a hetero/homo divide in
conceptions of male identity in twentieth century Western culture. While the
dominant culture strives to maintain homosexuality as marginal or
outside/peripheral to constructions of heterosexuality, Sedgwick (and others)
contend that the term is actually at the center of the definition of heterosexualtiy.
And that with the advent of the term homosexuality or the increasing visibility of
homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century a corresponding homophobic
panic emerged. As such the discourse surrounding homosexuality can be read in
line with Foucault and others in that it renders visible for the sake of erasing or
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rendering invisible or as in the case of Las Vegas and the performances of Siegfried
and Roy that which is deemed abject. The continual disappearing and reappearing
of Roy throughout the magic acts might then be read as a playful although clearly
unintentional representation of this tension between spectacle and invisibility that is
endemic to queer identity. (Perhaps this is the primary distinction I draw between
straight and gay representations of adolescence)
This return to childhood is important in that the movement attempts to elide
sexuality. Siegfried and Roy's magic acts with their emphasis on disappearing and
reappearing and its relation to the tension between revealing and not revealing their
sexual identity, engages this attempted elision. The return to the innocent space of
childhood within the locale of the hypersexualized Las Vegas, then, is not without
irony. The film can be read as problematic in its closeting but is nonetheless
interesting in terms of how S&R attempt to circumvent the labeling of their
sexuality, particularly with the emphasis the film places on a return to a childhood
state of wonderment. To re-vision what I said about Sedgwick's binary, in this
move to return to the child Siegfried and Roy seem to elide this homo/hetero binary
that Sedgwick sees as central to Western concepts of identity via a child whom
culturally we conceive of as sexually innocent. Similarly, the whiteness of the
tigers equates with purity and innocence. James Kincaid discusses the need for
children in contemporary American culture to be seen as pure and innocent if they
are to be alluring...so the child becomes both sexual and pure. He calls this an
empty innocence that validates the child’s story (9)—and I would add the equation
153
of Siegfried and Roy with childhood innocence has the same potential effect.
However, Kincaid’s larger argument is that “our culture has enthusiastically
sexualized the child while just as enthusiastically denying it has done any such
thing” (13).
While cultural narratives of childhood repeatedly construct that site as one
of sexual innocence, retroactive constructions of childhood, specifically, queer
narratives, repeatedly question the conflation of childhood with sexual innocence.
As such, the repressed sexual content in Siegfried and Roy’s The Magic Box, in this
case at least homoeroticism, returns. This is underscored by the narrative trajectory,
publicity stills, and the rubber costuming worn by the stage assistants which creates
the illusion of bared pumped pecs and six pack abs--not to mention the gigantic
codpiece Roy wears in the present day footage (that is a 3-D Imax codpiece).
Sedgwick contends that homosexuality can be read as a speech act of a
silence that eventually accrues particularity. The repressed sexual content in the
film then returns via this speech act--an instance in which the weight of the
"unspoken" or "unspeakable" outweighs the narrative. In this instance the unspoken
is gay sexuality and homoeroticism. When S&R meet on a "cruise" ship headed for
the United States, Siegfried as a magician in the lounge and Roy as a waiter with a
stow away cheetah from a Munich zoo, the voiceover says that Siegfried got more
than an assistant...and we know he did. The sequences of images in the film quite
easily slip into mourning for a lost childhood or a "normative" childhood as the
concept exists in the cultural imaginary. The cruiseship becomes an intermediary
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space, floating between two continents, the Eastern Europe of their childhood and
America the symbol of their future adulthood. Arguably the ship never arrives. It
maintains a space of limbo, a cite of perpetual adolescence not unlike the
manipulation of space in their stage performances where figures are suspended in
space, disappear and reappear completely in tact--the emphasis on reappearing
unchanged, always identifiable to the audience as the same figure. The effect is one
that both fixes and unfixes identity and, arguably, specifically sexual identity.
The spectator at a magician show often tries to see through the illusion, to
see how it is constructed, to look for slippages in the performance that might reveal
the construction of the trick. At a viewing of their show at the Mirage I observed
several audience members telling their companions that they could see how the
tricks were done, implying that the magic was not so skillfully executed. For this
observer the magic was executed flawlessly, impressively so. And so despite
Siegfried and Roy’s attempt to allude labeling, the audience is trained to do just
that …and yet there is simultaneously a willing suspension of disbelief, the
audience, the theater, the performance might also be read as a space, momentarily
detached, from the more pernicious and circulating narratives of mainstream
culture that attempt to label sexuality, and where one can invest in the illusion.
Possibly magic is the only culturally sanctioned cite where this can take place. And
so perhaps they do return to that childhood site of wonderment and innocence as
they are conceived in the cultural imaginary.
155
As numerous sociologists and cultural critics have noted the category of
childhood and especially the category of adolescence or what is often labeled as
youth culture is used to subsume the disruptive elements in culture in an attempt to
contain them, make them knowable and understood. But it is also characterized,
particularly early childhood, as a time lived in the immediate present...since
adulthood often connotes the acceptance of an unacceptable world many adults
often try to escape to the eternal "present" of childhood, particularly in straight
narratives, to regain a sense of immediate experience (Calcutt 186). This is most
prevalent in various artistic movements like the Romantics, the Beats, etc.
Nonetheless it is also read as a passing phase which foregrounds the instability
inherent in the category of childhood. And as critics like James Kincaid have noted
adolescence and those movements associated with adolescence are not taken
seriously and that we need to find a way to reread or reclaim the oppositional
energy associated with this category that cultural narratives of youth often attempt
to elide (Innocence 35).
In her book Outside Belongings, Elspeth Probyn suggests we suspend the
idea of childhood as origin—the tendency to inscribe a trajectory that answers the
question "why are we gay" or how did we get here. Instead she says it would be
more optimistic to view childhood as a site of beginnings free from moral strictures
and the necessity of writing that explains the present in relation to the past. As
other theorists like Joseph Natoli have noted "anything I've got to say about back
then should absolutely be taken as comments about right now" (97), a notion that
156
may disrupt our belief in "the past is prologue" and "if we don't learn from history
we are doomed to repeat it" views (97). The past can also function as a replacement
or analogue to the present or even a dream of restoration. Culturally, Siegfried and
Roy's The Magic Box very much comments on the present social anxieties in the
United States: the resurgence of family values and a move to restore, the somehow
lost, sanctity of childhood within our culture as represented by the return to the
child within. Seemingly, the site of childhood is free of the moral strictures and
burdens of adulthood that prevent us from experiencing the wonderment of the
world around us. Of course the play on moral strictures is not without irony …if
anything our sense of moral right and wrong as concerns children is heightened.
And so how do we read this flight from the present by two men who may or may
not be gay? They return to the free space of childhood and adolescence where one
is constantly in the process of becoming. The freedom that space affords may be
just another illusion as their own childhood's attest to but nonetheless it is an
illusion that our culture repeatedly invests in. Perhaps like the magicians they are
they get us to see what we want to see--to invest in the familiar pattern that
childhood is and always will be about uncorrupted innocence and not look for
slippages in the story or in the performance that undermine the illusion.
Siegfried and Roy's The Magic Box and the ways in which it can be read,
including my own reading, and its emphasis on queer adolescence play to this
tension between the desire for a fixed origin for identity for which the articulations
often become encumbered by pathologized tropes and the desire to return to the site
157
of child hood and immediate experience as a site of possibilities. It seems
appropriate then that Siegfried and Roy should be enshrined at the Mirage in
Vegas--the amusement park for adults--as Michael Sorkin has noted cities are now
ageographical because they have no sense of place and that this is all the fault of
television, telephone, and computer technologies which generate a simulated real,
depriving cities of those qualities that made them places of human connection. This
new realm is a city of simulations, television city, the city as theme park. This new
city he contends threatens an unimagined sameness even as it multiplies the
illusory choices of the TV system (98). However, cultural critics like Jim Collin
suggest that readings like Sorkin's are perfect examples of a master narrative which
must totalize at all costs, a totalization that fails to recognize how categories of
cultural differences might affect the meanings generated by any landscape (Collins
38)--might the performances of Siegfried and Roy as situated in Vegas and the
manipulation of the spatial via "magic" a reworking of the "real" then be read as a
site for a return to the immediacy of childhood, but a site that might also be read as
a repeatable point for beginnings, a point from which to re-envision possibilities.
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Endnotes
1
While homosexuality demands the internal coherence of sexed identities—desire
must testify to a difference that is only imaginable between two “natural,” “self-
evident” and opposite categories—homosexuality multiplies the differences that
desire can “apprehend in ways that menace the internal coherence of [these] sexed
identities.” See Lee Edelman, Homographesis (Routledge, 1994) 14.
2
In Music for Chameleons, a collection of essays and nonfiction writings published
in 1980, Capote, in a “self-interview” asked himself whether or not God had helped
him in his career. Capote replied: “Yes, more and more. But I am not a saint yet.
I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius. Of course, I
could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint.” Truman Capote,
Music for Chameleons. (Random House, 1980) 261.
3
While a number of critics and writers claim the sub genres of the gay
bildungsroman and the female bildungsroman, other critics and writers contend that
those sub genres and/or that the term is not appropriate given the historical
circumstances from which not just the bildungsroman evolved but the English
novel itself. See Helene Moglen The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the
English Novel (Univ of California P, 2001).
4
This would partly account for the melancholy that theorists like Michael Moon
ascribe to narratives of queer adolescence. Michael Moon A Small Boy and
Others:Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy
Warhol (Duke University Press, 1998).
5
The relationship between Sunshine and Randolph is open to speculation. At one
point in the novel, Sunshine spends the night drinking with Randolph in
Randolph’s room. Neither Joel nor the reader is made aware of what goes on inside
the room.
6
See Majorie Garber’s Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(Routledge 1992).
7
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge,
1993.
8
See Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.and Cherie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years.
Boston: South End Press, 1983. Also critics such as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano
argue that the Chicano movement sent the message that maintaining traditional
159
family and gender roles was the only way to resist Anglo domination. See “The
Female Subject in Chicano Theatre: Sexuality, Race, and Class.” Theatre Journal
38, no. 4 (December 1986): 386-407.
9
See Norma Alarcon’s “Conjugating Subjects: The Heteroglossia of Essence and
Resistance.” In An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic
Borderlands, edited by Alfred Artegag, 125-38. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994.
10
Jose Esteban Munoz uses a similar definition of hybridity in
Disidentifications:Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
11
See Biddy Martin’s “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being
Ordinary” in Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian. New
York: Routledge, 1996.
12
Karen Christian asserts this affiliation in her book Show and Tell: Identity as
Performance in U.S. Latino/a fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1997.
13
For an expanded discussion of the figure of the drag queen see Marjorie Garber’s
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge,
1992.
14
See Susan Stanford Friedman’s Mappings:Feminism and the Cultural
Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.
15
Homi BhaBha discusses the use of mimicry in post colonial texts in The Location
of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
16
Richard Ellis’ emphasis on the homo-act rather than a gay essence is in response
to Leo Bersani’s assertion that queer theory has failed to maintain its gay
specificity. “[Bersani] points out that queer theorists have successfully exposed the
disciplinary intent of identitarian discourses, but in so doing have lost sight of the
gay and lesbian subject, leaving intact the heterosexist structures they hoped to
subvert: “We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic
and political regimes that have constructed us, [but] they don’t need to be natural in
order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative (4). Ironically this
degaying of gayness amounts to a “disapperaing act” (5). Yet on the other hand its
“self-effacing” narcissism (150) is antirelational anticommunitarian and hence for
Bersani potentially more threatening to the given social order than the mere
emptying of identity to the resignification of dominant configurations of gender and
sexuality” (Ellis 6-9).
160
17
bell hooks. Feminist Theory: From Center to Margin. Boston: South End Press,
1984.
161
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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The out field: professional sports and the mediation of gay sexualities
Asset Metadata
Creator
Bohn, Jeffrey L.
(author)
Core Title
Wonder boys: tales of the extraordinarily queer adolescent
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Degree Conferral Date
2006-12
Publication Date
12/09/2008
Defense Date
12/20/2005
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
American Literature,OAI-PMH Harvest
Language
English
Advisor
Modleski, Tania (
committee chair
), Cheng, Victor (
committee member
), Gambrell, Alice (
committee member
), Gross, Larry (
committee member
), Kincaid, James R. (
committee member
), McKenna, Teresa (
committee member
), Sturken, Marita (
committee member
)
Creator Email
jebon@sbcglobal.net
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m222
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UC1473074
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etd-Bohn-20061208 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-164782 (legacy record id),usctheses-m222 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Bohn-20061208.pdf
Dmrecord
164782
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Bohn, Jeffrey L.
Type
texts
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(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu