... homosexuals always come to “sordid and bloody end[s]” in order to protect the “im- maculate manliness” (599) of the tough guy hero. Worse, Baldwin suggests, so many novels “concerned with homosexuality” replicate this very move, their gay protagonists meeting violent ends so the threat their gayness...

... and the personal force of individual desire plays out on a broader structural level as Baldwin’s gay plot is drawn toward the magnetically forceful heterosexual love triangle in Hemingway’s tale. Hemingway and Baldwin address gender normativity and sexual inadequacy from a particular American perspective that must...

... of Oscar Wilde. Founder of the Gate Theatre, and openly gay as early as 1928 when he moved to Dublin with his life partner, Hilton Edwards, mac Líammóir risked life and limb to redeem Wilde’s reputa- 343Twentieth-Century Literature 59.2 Summer 2013 343 Jesse Matz tion. Although...

...Robert Boyers w Reviews Modernism, Dead or Alive Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay NewYork:W.W. Norton, 2007. 610 pages Robert Boyers The word modernism no longer calls to mind a simple singular aesthetic or a particular set of ideas. To think about what it means is to ask...

.... Furthermore, if Diana Trilling and other midcentury critics chose to discuss Capote’s sexuality, it is certainly appropriate to examine how. A secondary aim of this article is to question the current standing of Capote in current literary, gay, lesbian, and queer studies. When I offer Capote...

... or criminals” (304). Barnes’s so-called criminal friends were the gays and lesbians who were part of her social milieu in Greenwich Village in the 1910s, where she resided before relocating in 1920 to a similar community of American expatriate sexual dissidents on Paris’s Left Bank, whose lives she...

... of the Establish­ ment to serve the purposes of gay liberation and the counterculture, Capote is a “difficult subject,” as we say.The standard view in gay- lesbian studies and queer theory, as the essay points out, is that Ca­ pote was a “careerist, apolitical aesthete, and celebrity qua celebrity.” No one...

.... —Whitman, Leaves of Grass (46) I lo w should we account for the relatively unexpected appearance of Samuel Beckett on the final page of Leo Bersani’s Homos? By what ab­ ject logic can Beckett be linked with the three gay outlaws— Gide, Proust, and, most proximately, Genet—whose writing...

... and Weisenburger. Indeed, the refigurative potential of sexual connection expressed by “Victim in a Vacuum!” anticipates gay pornographer John Preston’s recollection of the early gay leather scene, in which “the bonding was profound, it was based on having shared raw sex and on the acceptance of raw sex...

... certainly be read as “straight” by main­ stream audiences, they simultaneously allow a gay male readership to iden­ tify in them a distinctively homoerotic subtext, a subjectivity that allows for a reading or readings that are distinct from the conventional hetero- normative interpretation. One...

.... In accordance with the Derridean logic of the supplement, homosexuality is always already there in any effort to define the heterosexual. Thus, to 180 Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and Sexual “Perversion” suggest that the straight is normal and the gay abnormal is to misunder- stand both...

...-Nazi” after all. Finally, Spiro’s fourth chapter, “Eventually We’re All Queer: Fascism, Nazism, and Homosexuality” looks at the ways gay and lesbian characters in each novel destabilize sexual norms. Spiro turns to the early twentieth- century “discourse of homosexuality” to help explain...

... poetics Gossip, though it can be exceedingly interesting when the parties are alive, is not at all interesting when they’re dead. —W. H. Auden (1946) Who could ever think—in particular, at this date, what gay man—that someone’s death ever stopped the elaboration of someone else’s fantasy...

... and interior the historical experience of gay individuals in a cli- mate of emotional disenfranchisement and social exclusion. “Through the parsing of attachments,” observes Sarah Brophy, “or the ‘microintimacies of domesticity,’ The Line of Beauty points toward the possibility of new forms of thinking...

... discusses his gay identity with early lovers, including his Amherst College teacher Kimon Friar and his first partner Claude Fredericks. His correspondence with his mother, Hellen, would fill a volume the size of A Whole World ; but a selection of early letters illuminate his Oedipal relations with his...

... of understanding another’s— or even one’s own— experience. Woolf writes of the woman: There was a recklessness about her; much in the spirit of Lon­ don. Defiant—almost gay, clasping her dog as if for warmth. How many Junes has she sat there, in the heart o f London? How she came...

... ets allude to both Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and the historic shame associated with homosexuality (and repudiated by the gay rights movement) to describe the experience of the depressed. Yet to look more closely at these two analogies is to expose an uncertainty in Styron’s text...

... preoccupation with the past invites readers to examine the ways in which the historical legacy of racial slavery continues to inhabit the present. Clifford’s diary begins with the words, “My name’s Clifford Pepperidge and I am in trouble” ( CB 12). The reader learns that he is an expatriate gay “American...

... academic forum. Other recent scholarship has productively worked to put Auden in conversation with non-Anglophone literary movements and traditions, though more work might yet be done on his stateside ties to the gay, Jewish, African American, and émigré communities in the postwar years. Encouraging new...

...). Disagreement with the official, triumphalist history, while not always well received—think of the flap over the Smithsonian’s 1995 exhibit of the Enola Gay, which was deemed too negative by veteran’s groups—certainly continued. In some ways these reactions probably encouraged it. And this questioning...