My Captain Rainbow Decoder Ring

I've run into a rough spot in Jaime Harker's Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America.  In her discussion of Isherwood's novel A Single Man, she talks about his "careful encoding of Los Angeles gay life" (126).  She refers to coding often, and I don't think it means what she thinks it means -- or rather, I'm not sure what she thinks it means.  My understanding is that "coding" means using signs to refer to subjects that can't, for whatever reason, be named directly.  (Or "explicitly," another term that seems to confuse not only Harker but many writers.  Is "explicitly" becoming the new "literally"?)

Harker claims, for example, that the description of George's gym is coded, because "Bodybuilding culture in Los Angeles was, of course, notoriously queer" (127).  But it's not clear that the gym is particularly gay, though like any homosocial space it draws some gay men.  I suspect Harker believes that only gay men indulge in "outrageous posing in front of the mirrors" or rub their faces with skin cream because "I can't afford to get old."

Immediately after, Harker describes George's reflections on young male "hustlers (recognizable at once to experienced eyes like George's) who stand scowling on the street corners or staring into shops with the maximum of peripheral vision" as another of Isherwood's "secret messages" (127).  But by pointing the hustlers out to the reader, Isherwood is acting less like a spy than like a colorful native tour guide, drawing the tourist's attention to local fauna.  There's no secret message here: on the next page of the novel George reflects that he could easily hire one of these boys, but doesn't want their "bought unwilling bodies" (A Single Man,104).  While Isherwood was aware of his gay readership, A Single Man is still written with an eye to the clueless straight reader.  Far from coding, Isherwood explains the codes.

Harker also takes George's visit to the bar where he met his late lover as "another encoded reference to Los Angeles gay culture.  He provides a detailed genealogy of the bar that isn't exclusively gay but nevertheless embraces a transgressive ethos of gay bars" (Harker, 129).  I'm not sure what that last clause is supposed to mean, and it's true that in this case Isherwood is less explicit about the Starboard Side than in the other cases I've discussed: he avoids specifying the sex of the clientele, though bars, like gyms, are traditionally homosocial spaces, so even a heterosexual reader might assume that most of the patrons were male -- except for the "Huge diesel-dikes slugging it out, grimmer far than the men" (130). But Isherwood is explicit that George went there expecting to find sexual partners, that George is only interested sexually in other males, and that he found his male lover there.  Perhaps this episode teeters on the edge of coding, but only a straight reader who was determined not to recognize that George is queer and lives in what used to be called the homosexual "underworld" could suppose that the Starboard Side was just another neighborhood tavern.

Coding in gay and lesbian writing has usually taken certain forms: casting erotic same-sex relationships as "platonic" friendships (usually called "homosocial" these days); addressing the beloved as "you" in poetry or love songs while leaving out any explicit signs of the beloved's sex; or Proust's Albertine strategy, where same-sex lovers in autobiographical material are recast as the other sex.  (For example, the faithless female character Albertine in Remembrance of Things Past is widely assumed to have been based on one of the author's boyfriends.)  In his earlier fiction Isherwood himself simply treated his stand-in character as a sexless observer ("I am a camera") of the queer goings-on around him.  None of these codes seems to be in use in A Single Man.  Even where Isherwood is not totally explicit in every detail, a novel told from the viewpoint of a gay protagonist is not likely to employ much coding.  I may be retrojecting my post-Stonewall assumptions here, but I read A Single Man as a forerunner of later works which don't intentionally exclude straight readers but don't cater to them either.

Jaime Harker does a good job excavating some of the historical context of Isherwood's American writing.  She's spent time in the archives, reading his rough drafts and correspondence, and that's very helpful.  Unfortunately she's not a very good critic.  But Middlebrow Queer was still worth reading.

Those Who Remember History Are Doomed to Bang Their Heads Against the Wall -- Forever

I've begun reading The Brokeback Book, a collection of articles on Brokeback Mountain edited by William R. Handley and published this year by the University of Nebraska Press. Some of the articles are new, but others appeared before. One of these is David Leavitt's 2005 review of the film, which originally appeared at Slate. Leavitt is a novelist himself, but that doesn't really qualify him to write about either gay fiction or gay film. He showed himself to be quite ignorant on both subjects, in fact.

Of Jack Twist's pickup of a male hustler in Juarez, Mexico, Leavitt wrote:

For just a few seconds, we get a glimpse of the urban nightscape that was the locus of the very gay movies that might have been playing, in big cities, at the moment when the scene takes place—movies like Nighthawks and Taxi zum Klo, in which sexual profligacy is at once celebrated as a form of liberation and mourned as a pallid substitute for meaningful connection.

(Nighthawks is a British film, directed by Paul Hallam, that was released in 1978; the German Taxi zum Klo, directed by Frank Ripploh, was released in 1980.) Whatever else can be said about it, Jack's connection in Ciudad Juárez is something he could have found in most smaller cities in the US, and even many small towns, and he might not even have had to pay for the sex he found there. There's nothing specifically "urban" about that "nightscape." Juárez, lying just across the border, is simply convenient for a closeted Texan whose distant boyfriend wasn't available.

Leavitt went on:

It goes without saying that Brokeback Mountain is an entirely different kind of film. Perhaps it takes a woman to create a tale in which two men experience sex and love as a single thunderbolt, welding them together for life; certainly Proulx's story is a far cry from such canonical gay novels as Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony or Allan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, which poeticize urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring. Proulx, by contrast, exalts coupledom by linking it to nature.

I suppose that The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997) are "canonical," but they're not the only canonical gay male novels. I presume Leavitt chose these two to make Brokeback Mountain look as utterly different from "canonical gay novels" as possible. He could just as well have cited his own novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), which also depicted "urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring." But he chose to ignore any number of other canonical gay male novels built around coupledom, from Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) to Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner (1973) to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1976-2010) to most of Christopher Bram's novels, starting with Surprising Myself (1987), and so on down to the present.

The same is true of films. I liked Brokeback Mountain when it was first released, but I think I was less impressed by it than many people were, including many gay men, because I knew what had gone before it; it didn't feel unique and unprecedented to me. When I think of gay male films, most of the best and most interesting were made independently of Hollywood, which preferred to use gay men and lesbians as symbols of dehumanized evil or mockery. From A Very Natural Thing (1974) to Parting Glances (1986) to Torch Song Trilogy (1988) to Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), independent cinema about gay men can't be reduced to a celebration of urban sexual adventuring opposed to coupledom in a state of nature. For that matter, Richard Amory's 1966 pulp Song of the Loon and its sequels depicted sexual adventuring and romantic coupledom in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. Song of the Loon was even made into a 1970 softcore film.

Remember that, except for The Swimming Pool Library, we're just talking about films and books produced in the United States. Look to traditions of homosexual literature in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, and Leavitt's account stands exposed more nakedly as the narrow and simplistic copout it is. It doesn't help that in the 1990s Leavitt co-edited an anthology of "homosexual literature in English from 1748 to 1914", and another of international gay writing. Of course, they may be as inadequate as this review; I haven't seen them. But it's hard to believe he's really as ignorant as he comes across in his review of Brokeback Mountain.

And of course, I've done a lot of complaining about the reductive and inaccurate accounts of gay history and literature produced by academics. Or about the distorted picture of gay history promulgated by self-serving hacks like Andrew Sullivan. (Leavitt has a history of the same sort of distortion, most notably a baffling essay on how Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance freaked him out as a young fagling. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, of course, but Leavitt seriously misread the book. Lev Raphael wrote a critical response to Leavitt for the Lambda Book Review in 1995, which unfortunately isn't available online.) This is a problem that extends beyond GLBTQ history, but I feel it acutely in that domain. Handley no doubt included Leavitt's review as a historical curiosity; I hope that other pieces in The Brokeback Book are better.