Gay Lerature: Poetry and Prose | Oxford Rearch Encyclopedia of Lerature

Contents:

• GAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSEGAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSE
• GAY LERATURE IS OUT OF THE CLOSET. SO WHY IS DECEPTN A BIG THEME?
• GAY LERATURE ESSAY
• GAY AND LBIAN STUDI

GAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSEGAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSE

Bisexualy has been viewed wh gay studi as distct om homosexualy, and bisexuals have found themselv exclud om gay events and anizatns although a great many “gay ins” om Socrat to Shakpeare to Osr Wil were married and fathered children. The word “homosexual” was, fact, created the late neteenth century as an English equivalent for German Homosexualtät, which first appeared prt 1869 a pamphlet argug agast the Pssian legal that prcribed punishments for men who engaged same-sex relatns.

Adoptg his posn, crics have argued, for example, that Walt Whman and Osr Wil (1854–1900) were not, strictly speakg, homosexuals, at least the sense that medil and psychologil tablishments unrstood that “ndn” or “speci” the twentieth century. Whether the dividual is born homosexual or his or her homosexual sir are socially nstcted, is clear that medi-scientific theori of homosexualy as a curable disease were an ventn of the late neteenth and early twentieth centuri.

One rells thgs as var as Ernt Hemgway's dismissive attu toward homosexuals his books, the “pansi” played for lghs Hollywood films of the 1920s and 1930s, and Hart Crane's joyo announcement—havg, he believed, fallen love wh a woman—that he was not homosexual after all. Although Amerin lerature the first two-thirds of the twentieth century almost always impli the medi-scientific fn whenever homosexualy enters the text, Whman had his own succsors, om Bliss Carman (1861–1929) and Richard Hovey (1864–1900) to Marsn Hartley (1877–1943) to Langston Hugh (1902–1967) and Gerr Lansg (b.

GAY LERATURE IS OUT OF THE CLOSET. SO WHY IS DECEPTN A BIG THEME?

Hallock vtigat one pecially tense relatnship his bgraphy of Fz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867), The Amerin Byron (2000), whom he views as a homosexual drawn to the younger poet Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820). Sedgwick se Jam as a homosexual who rarely alt openly wh male timacy but whose work foc on “homosocial” (her term) suatns that occur when, for example, two men stggle for the attentn of a woman; emotns are directed by each man more strongly toward his petor than toward their shared object of sire.

Although Sedgwick nsirs Billy Budd to be suffed wh homosexual sir, she pots out that there is only one homosexual the morn sense the story: Claggart, who has the self-loathg of those who have ternalized homophobia, and who is “praved bee he is, his sir, a pervert, ” or “homosexual” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. The many homosexual Amerin poets the early twentieth century who were athet clud Amy Lowell (1874–1925), Wilbur Unrwood (1876–1935), Donald Evans (1884–1921), Gee Sylvter Viereck (1884–1962), John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950), Clark Ashton Smh (1893–1961), and Samuel Greenberg (1883–1917), whose poems Hart Crane emulated his own early work.

Viereck knew Magn Hirschfeld (1868–1935), an early German “sexologist” and fenr of male-male love, and based Children of Lilh on Hirshfeld's fn of homosexualy as a “transnal sex, ” mergg the mascule wh the feme. Public attus toward homosexuals are suggted by an cint the early 1940s when John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), who had accepted a poem by Robert Dunn (1919–1988) for the Kenyon Review, whdrew his offer after Dunn published an say another journal on homosexualy.

GAY LERATURE ESSAY

Ransom plimented Dunn for havg taken such a bold stand—although actually the say is impartial, argug that homosexualy is no better, if no worse, than any other kd of life—but sisted that the poem schled for the Review might now be read as “homosexual advertisement” (Faas, 1983, p. Stt Fzgerald (1896–1940), but the evince is slight, and any se, a lerature domated by Ezra Pound (1885–1972), William Flkner (1897–1962), and Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953), gay and lbian ncerns had ltle room. 1928), and William Inge (1913–1973), and highly regard novels wh homosexual them and suatns, such as Two Ser Ladi (1943) by Jane Bowl (1917–1973), The Member of the Weddg (1946) by Carson McCullers (1917–1967), The Cy and the Pillar (1948) by Gore Vidal (b.

The so-lled School of Boston, which provid one of the avant-gar's rpons the 1960s to the mastream works of Robert Lowell (1917–1977) and Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), was almost entirely gay, cludg such poets as John Weers (1934–2002), Gerr Lansg, and Stephen Jonas (1920–1970).

The gay liberatn movement and the gradual public awarens that homosexualy was not the disease the psychiatric tablishment had claimed led to a luge of “g-out” stori, which the thor narrat her or his progrs om “the closet” to an open life as a gay woman or man. Numero anthologi of gay wrg—Stephen Coote's The Pengu Book of Homosexual Verse (1983), Carl Morse and Joan Lark's Gay and Lbian Poetry Our Time (1989), and Edmund Whe's Faber Book of Gay Short Fictn (1991), to ce three of the most rpected—prent no evince that “gay wrg” is sentially more than wrg about gay life. 1965), refully documents a range of poetic tradns om the formalist to the highly experimental whout fdg any that grew om a basilly gay athetic: “Of urse there are poems that overtly flnt their sexualy, ” Liu nclus, “but there are so many quieter poems (and poets) who might elu the most fely tuned gaydar [sensivy to others' gay inty].

GAY AND LBIAN STUDI

The thirty-two years that separate Isherwood's and Holleran's books were so fired wh crisis—the gay liberatn movement and then AIDS—that the fundamental flaw homosexual culture, namely, that has been profoundly a culture for and of the young, has not received as much attentn as should. Melville's isolato exemplify Emersonian self-reliance, but homosexualy Isherwood's and Holleran's works is seen all too accurately as a re of passage to a dimished sexual and emotnal matury that no culture should wish on s members.