Not That There's Anything Wrong With That!

Published in GCN, April 1980. At least one more book on the straight woman/gay man constellation appeared in the 1980s, and I was given a review copy but I don't think I ever finished the review. The archetype persists, through Will and Grace to numerous pop books on gay men and women, like 1997's Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man, written by (you guessed it) a gay man and his straight woman friend.

What annoyed me about The New Couple was its assumption that heterosexuality was an ideal for everyone, including gay men. (As you'll see if you read the review, a lesbian/straight man "new couple" - let alone lesbian/straight woman, or gay man/straight man - wasn't on the authors' radar.) The anthropologist Margaret Mead was reported to have said something like "Exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality." Which is true: zero equals zero, by which I mean that neither is sick. It's revealing how the postulate that exclusive homosexuality is "sick" managed to sneak in there, isn't it?

The New Couple: Women and Gay Men
Rebecca Nahas and Myra Turley
Seaview Books, 1979

It is a commonplace of sexual folklore that homosexuality involves fear or hatred of the opposite sex, and yet as a corollary of the equally popular notion of gays as an intermediate sex it is taken for granted that gay men enjoy the company of women. Lately it seems that articles purporting to explore this paradox have been getting more common – the Village Voice rediscovers it every other year or so, most recently on December 24, 1979, and Christopher Street touted two articles on the cover of its October / November 1979 issue – so I was not surprised when a book, The New Couple: Women and Gay Men, turned up in the bookstores, and one of its authors turned up with live exhibits on Phil Donahue. Tomorrow, the Sunday Supplements.

I am immediately distrustful of books entitled The New anything, and I made no exception in this case, especially when I learned from the Donahue show that Naha and Turley’s utopian vision involves sexual relationships between gay men and straight women, including marriage. It also became rapidly clear as I read the book that in the authors’ universe gay women are a fringe phenomenon: the word “women” in the title means straight women, though one lesbian and one bisexual woman are among their interviewees.

The New Couple divides relationships between women and gay men into three categories: “Traditional couples,” defined as “Women and gay men, some married, who attempt to ignore, hide, or change the man’s homosexuality”; “Marginal relationships,” involving “Women and openly gay men who are not romantically involved, but are professional and/or social friends”; and “New couples,” who are “Women and openly gay men who have a primary, not necessarily exclusive, love commitment.” These categories are somewhat arbitrary – how “primary” some of the new-couple relationships are is arguable, as is the marginality of some of the marginal relationships – but then they are more designed to help market the book than to cast light on what is going on. What really differentiates “new” from “marginal” couples is that “new” men are able and willing to relate sexually and romantically to women, and “marginal” men are not. The authors not only take for granted that an exclusively homosexual man is less liberated than a bisexual one, they hint that he is unhip and probably neurotic. “The homosexual mindset can be just as narrow and exclusionary as any heterosexual approach to male/female relationships,” they chide: “… homosexuality was used as a reason not to have a successful [heterosexual] relationship.” Seems like a pretty good reason to me.

Of course, the woman in a new couple has to be a pretty special person herself. She must be “very warm, very motherly,” “not bitchy … not threatening … warm and open and love,” “diffident, unassuming, and pleasant,” must have “an ability to relate openly and affectionately to people regardless of their sexual orientation,” in short she must be “a very warm person, she wants to make you feel comfortable.” She should not be “a typical fruit fly, a woman who dresses a little bit sleazier than the norm,” and “misfits whom nobody likes” need not apply. But happily, according to one of the authors’ informants, “Gays are good at helping you decide what to wear. They like you to look well if you’re going to be with them.” In other words, they don’t have much tolerance for a woman who isn’t feminine in a very traditional way. But if she gives and accepts and relates openly and affectionately and doesn’t bitch or threaten or assume, if she lets herself be dressed up like a Barbie doll, she may graduate from traditional to marginal relationships, until she meets a gay man with whom she can have a primary, new-couple relationship – until he meets Mr. Right and moves out, anyway, or as sometimes happens, moves Mr. Right in.

Reading The New Couple, I would never have guessed that there is such a thing as gay male misogyny. But at best we are susceptible to the everyday woman-hating that pervades the society that reared us; at worst we are a subculture where the words “bitch,” “slut,” and “fish” are staples of repartee. The New Couple merely gives the impression that a woman who doesn’t get along with gay men must be a misfit whom nobody likes, perhaps because she bitches or threatens or isn’t motherly enough. There is not a hint that a woman might have something else to do with her life than mother gay men.

Lip service is paid to the gay liberation and women’s movements, but references are almost invariably to mental-health professionals with the feminist consciousness of an alpha-male Hamadryas baboon. The literature on homosexuality is represented by Bieber, Bergler, Ellis and Socarides at least as often as by Hooker, Hoffman, Bell and Weinberg. The only gay writers cited at all often are Howard Brown and John Rechy, and the only feminists cited are Elizabeth Janeway and Betty Friedan. Some of the gay men interviewed have been active in the gay movement, but none of the women seem to have been involved as a feminist.

There is a small but important truth, however, hidden here in the tangle of footnotes and pop-sociological platitudes: people don’t fit into categories, whether homosexual/heterosexual or traditional couple/new couple, and successful relationships may develop where they are least expected. Although “new couples” are supposedly “only as old as the gay liberation movement,” one mentioned in this book was in progress in 1964, five years before Stonewall. Just as there have always been healthy, happy gays, surely there have always been successful “new couples” that no one heard about because they didn’t end in the divorce courts or psychiatrists’ offices. What we need most is not trendy books with more useless categories, but a society that will encourage us to find happiness in our own weird, unlikely ways.

The Grand Old Party

Published in GCN, April 1980. I was embarrassed, as I was typing this in, to notice that I wrote confidently about the bulk of Maugham's writing as if I knew it. In fact I'd only read Of Human Bondage, and one or two his stories, and though I've had his collected stories on my shelves for many years, that is still all I've read. Time to do something about that, I guess.

Maugham
by Ted Morgan
Simon & Schuster, 1980

“Gossip is the food of the gods,” the noted raconteur and bon vivant Andrew Sutherland once remarked, and I don’t doubt that W. Somerset Maugham would have agreed with him. Gossip was the dust into which Maugham breathed the breath of life to make his best fictions, and what was the Villa Mauresque intended to be but his own private Olympus, where the witty and notable could sip ambrosia and be brilliant, with Maugham presiding over it all as Father Zeus? Complete, as Ted Morgan’s biography of Maugham reminds us, with thunderbolt.

Of course, Maugham’s fondness (indeed avidity) for gossip stopped short of his own affairs, and in his will he directed not only that all recipients of his letters should please destroy them, but that his estate should give no assistance to biographers. He had indulged in a certain amount of autobiographical writing, in which he had told the world as much as he was willing it should know. If he could not prevent the writing of biographies, he could at least hope to limit their revelations and their reliability. It is not surprising that few if any letters were burnt, but it is surprising that Maugham’s literary executor should have broken down and given his imprimatur to Ted Morgan’s Maugham, citing Morgan’s “scrupulous research” and “the fact that he had not attempted to pass any moral judgment on any character concerned.” About this “fact” I will have more to say presently.

The trouble with gossip about the great – and a biography is gossip – is that we who read it may not ourselves be great enough. We may titillate ourselves with shock that the famous (like our parents, another revelation from which many of us never quite recover) have genitals and use them. We may grab too eagerly at the subject's weaknesses for evidence that he was no better than we are, worse even, and so we are justified in being complacent.

As much generosity of spirit is required to write a biography as to read one. The biographer, flush with knowledge and power, may take too much pleasure in bringing a legend to earth. Maugham’s best fiction was an invitation to join him on a lofty, omniscient level where to understand all was to forgive all, to be as worldly and unshockable as the Old Party himself, to feel empathy with rather than smug superiority to the frailties of others. Biography can offer the same invitation, provided its literary model is Madame Bovary and not the National Enquirer. Mr. Morgan, it seems to me, tends toward the latter.

On one hand, reading Maugham requires the reader to play biographer. Mr. Morgan has certainly done his homework, and has assembled a huge mass of data – letters, gossip, interviews, summaries of Maugham’s books and plays with excerpts from reviews, passages from memoirs by Maugham’s friends and enemies, and trivia such as the number of the stateroom Maugham once occupied on the Queen Mary – and dumped it all together, undigested, imposing on it only a chronological order. Someone could write a fine shorter book on Maugham using this one as a source, and I wish someone (preferably gay) would. I can’t imagine anyone reading Mr. Morgan for, or with, pleasure. At best his prose is competent. It’s a pity he didn’t have the humility, as Maugham did, to ask a grammarian to pick over his manuscript.

On the other hand, where Mr. Morgan has made some effort to digest his material, I find myself grateful for the large amounts he leaves more or less untouched. He has a tendency to attribute statements to his sources indirectly so that it is hard to tell where the source ends and he begins. For example, he neds a long paragraph footnoted to Lady Alfred Ayer with the comment, “Homosexuality … had contributed to the death of the heart.” Who is passing judgment here? That Alan Searle’s “sexual services were still needed” by Maugham in his seventies is attributed to Searle, but judging by direct quotation from Searle elsewhere I don’t believe he would have worded it so clinically. Would Mr. Morgan sum up a heterosexual marriage in such terms as “In addition, he provided sexual relief whenever Maugham required it”? Barbara Back’s parties may have been known to heterosexual London “for the size of their heterosexual contingent,” a bigot’s way of saying that gays at at her parties were not required to wear a straight façade. If the isle of Capri became “a sanctuary for the third sex,” a sanctuary was, after all, needed. Mr. Morgan may feel impressively Olympian when he adopts these clinical, patronizing, and snide turns of phrase, but I have the impression that homosexuality makes him uncomfortable. But he is such a bad writer that I can’t be sure.

Mr. Morgan is also given to facile psychologizing, so that he hardly needs the moral judgments which Maugham’s executor praised him for eschewing. He tries to pin Maugham’s misogyny on feelings of abandonment caused by his mother’s death when he was eight. “Women, going back to his mother, were a disappointment, an unreliable species,” he speculates on Maugham’s motivation. “He appears to have enjoyed turning [actresses] down for parts, as if through them he were punishing all women,” Morgan writes later, as though Maugham weren’t equally petty in the exercise of power over men. He seems to think Maugham’s homosexuality was caused by his misogyny, but if that were true there would be few straight men in the world. He goes on at great length about Maugham’s stammer – there are twenty-eight entries under “Maugham, W. Somerset, stammer of” in the index – citing “the list of negativistic syndromes developed by the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan,” into which “Maugham’s behavior fits quite neatly.” The fact that “its origins are quite unknown” does not prevent Mr. Morgan from saying things like “a stammer is something you do to yourself,” “a way of telling the world that he was not like others,” “a way of guaranteeing the situation that you foresee.” “The stammerer has some quarrel with himself, he sets up his own roadblocks.” With comments like these, who needs moral judgments?

Still, the book is valuable. Everything you ever wanted to know about W. Somerset Maugham, plus much else, is in it: Maugham’s unhappy childhood, his wretched marriages (to Sylvie Barnardo and Gerald Haxton – Maugham once said of Haxton to Godfrey Winn, a young writer, “You do not know what it is like, Godfrey, and I hope you never will, to be married to someone who is married to drink”), his humiliating senescence (“If you think I’m gaga, you should see Winston [Churchill]”, he told S. N. Behrman). Yet he was a fascinating figure: his writing career spanned sixty-five years, he was famous for most of it, and he hobnobbed with the literary and social lions of three generations. It’s easy to despise him – he made it easy – and as a role model for gays he had little to offer. He never spoke up for the repeal of the British Sexual Offenses Act (but neither did W. H. Auden or that old darling E. M. Forster), and he never spoke again to one man who tried to get him to do so. But Maugham himself summed up the matter best, in a passage about Wagner quoted by Morgan:

I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving some of their virtues.