American Homo

Homoeroticism pervades American life. Among many other things, it provides the cultural context underlying the development of visible gay and lesbian communities. Homoeroticism exists as a long-standing structure of feeling in American culture. Such a structure reflects organized and relatively enduring relationships between homosexual desire, behavior, and cultural forms of expression.^[2]

Homoeroticism as a reality in U.S. society has taken several forms over more than two centuries. Even before Europeans arrived in North America, many tribal societies sanctioned homosexual behavior, as distinct from what we conceive of as a homosexual identity. Early European explorers and colonists viewed some of these homosexual practices as belonging to a broad category of nonprocreative sexual acts. This does not mean that the Church or state approved of homosexual behavior or eroticism; Christians considered homosexual behavior, particularly sodomy, to be theologically unacceptable.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opportunities for same-sex erotic activities varied by gender, class, and race. Within the white working class, both men and women were increasingly able to form same-sex attachments as more people worked outside the family economy. Homosexual intimacy was probably common among white wage-earning men. Such laborers, often dwelling in cities and large towns, had greater geographic mobility, more access to housing for those who were single, and higher levels of employment than did women, blacks, or even those who worked in agriculture. Same-sex social situations were extremely common in nineteenth-century America.^[3] In such situations, male bonding—often an important aspect of social relations in those environments—may have blended with erotic experience. This is not to say that the nineteenth century was a "golden age" of homoeroticism. In the middle class, men had more opportunities than women for same-sex physical intimacy, although same-sex romantic friendships might have had a sexual component for both men and women.^[4]

People feared erotic bonding on many levels; some nineteenth-century commentators believed that it (as well as masturbation) sapped entrepreneurial energies.^[5] Christian theology and procreative ideology—which were often conflated—condemned homosexual behavior as sinful or detrimental to the survival of the species. Homophobia (as a phenomenon—the term was only invented in 1971) led people to stigmatize homosexuality and stirred up a fear of homoeroticism, causing many to define the emotional bonds within same-sex relationships in nonsexual terms.^[6]

Homoeroticism and the passions of homosexuality have motivated men and women to embark on geographic expeditions; participate in antipoverty campaigns; initiate educational reform; fight for women's rights; propose reforms in the treatment of prisoners and juvenile delinquents; serve in the military as soldiers, sailors, and medics; and join in civil rights struggles. The lives of many of these women and men remain hidden or denied in American social history.^[7]

Whereas there is direct as well as much indirect evidence of this repressed homoeroticism in diaries, letters, and legal documents, representations

of homosexuality have also surfaced in American novels, plays, poetry, visual arts, and many forms of popular culture. Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick includes one of the boldest representations in his account of Queequeg and Ishmael's sleeping arrangements and subsequent warm embraces. Walt Whitman's "Calamus" poems found many readers who recognized their deeply felt homosexuality; the poems also strongly affected a number of European intellectuals who campaigned for homosexual rights during the late nineteenth century.^[8] Although widely celebrated literary and artistic figures—Melville, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Greta Garbo, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg—drew their inspiration from homosexual passions, that fact is routinely suppressed.

Homoeroticism is also a cultural semiotic, albeit a heavily coded one. It is a cultural formation, a system of meanings, signifying the potential intimacy, sexual pleasure, and sensibility of same-sex bonding that the hegemonic regime of compulsory heterosexuality prohibits.^[9] For example, Michael Moon has proposed that "between American literature and homoeroticism there have historically been peculiar and intimate connections."^[10] Moon has also noted, however, the extraordinary degree to which discourses dealing with abortion, contraception, prostitution, masturbation, and homosexuality have overlapped and affected social issues such as education, public health, housing and racial conflict, masculinity, and nationalism.^[11]

This strong historic presence of homosexuality has its dark side—a virulent hatred and suspicion of the homoerotic. This antihomosexual paranoia—what we now call homophobia—arouses visceral anxieties of homosexual conspiracy, horror of sexual advances, the assumption of rampant sexual abuse of children, and panic about one's own homosexual desires.^[12] The degree to which homoeroticism has been repressed or the way in which it has been stigmatized has varied quite significantly over the last two hundred or more years.^[13] There have been periods of relative tolerance, such as the 1920s, and moments of cultural history imbued with homoerotic expression, such as the American Literary Renaissance of the 1850s, the Harlem Renaissance of the

1920s, and post-World War II art and literature. These, however, alter nate and even overlap with episodes of persecution: Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1919 investigation of homosexuality in the Navy; the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, which scapegoated homosexuals as security risks; and, currently, religious conservatives' twenty-year crusade to eliminate the open presence of lesbians and gay men from American life.^[14]

The interlocking structures of feeling—of homoeroticism and homophobia—have long been bound up with other social forces.^[15] The whole complex of attitudes and practices, both antagonistic and affirmative, that I identify by the phrase American homo draws on a deeply ingrained "polymorphous perverse" sexuality in American culture. Polymorphous perversity reflects sexuality before it is unified and narrowly focused on heterosexual intercourse. The libidinal energy of perverse desire, tirelessly tamed and harnessed by hegemonic social structures, repeatedly erupts to shatter dominant social patterns, identities, and norms. It is a steady current throughout American history sustained by sexual subcultures and dissenters who resist the heteronormative organization of desire.

These deeply embedded structures of feeling and libidinal energies are reconfigured through a long-term historical process of sexual revolution. In this revolution, social forces remapped the biological capacities of sexual and gender roles. During this process, the mapping repeatedly breaks down, partly because social groups' actions reshape roles and institutions but also because of those actions' unanticipated consequences. Thus, the gay movement, by encouraging the public disclosure of its members' homosexuality, has provoked the political mobilization of religious conservatives.

Since the mid-1970s, American homosexuals have been poised to break through into public life. Many straight people, however, hesitate to include homosexuals openly in American life. Homosexuals' enlistment in the military, gay and lesbian marriages, and representations of two women or two men kissing on a prime-time television show—these actions provoke anxiety, perhaps even fear and loathing. The Religious Right arouses and channels these anxieties, depicting homosexuals as

the symbol of American decadence, the illustration of the decline and fall of the American empire.

Ironically, since the advent of the AIDS epidemic, homosexuality has directly entered mainstream American political discourse, while at the same time the Right has launched a momentous campaign to reshape American values. This campaign aspires to be as far-reaching as the restoration of traditional values attempted at the end of World War II. At that time, young white women were pushed out of the labor force and back into the family; communists were arrested, blacklisted, and forced to flee; and the mass media, big corporations, and the power elite encouraged cultural conformity.

The culture wars of the present are, as Irving Kristol has said, a new cold war. Now, instead of containing "the communist threat," American conservatives seek to crush the "homosexual threat" to America's so-called traditional family values. Homosexuality, along with abortion, is the code word for the threat to American society. Implicitly (because it is no longer acceptable to "blame" most of these groups publicly), the Right also refers to African Americans, Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans as threats.

Contemporary Americans face a prolonged political-cultural war over the acceptability of homosexuality. Neither side has a decisive advantage. Nor will the issue be resolved in the near future. The Religious Right has been organizing around the homosexual issue ever since Anita Bryant's 1977 "Save Our Children" campaign. Attacking homosexuality was a major theme at the 1992 Republican National Convention. "In 1992 in Houston, I talked about the cultural war going on for the soul of America," Pat Buchanan reminded voters during the 1996 Republican primary campaign. "And that war is still going on! We cannot worship the false god of gay rights. To put that sort of relationship on the same level as marriage is a moral lie."^[16] During the Republican primaries, Buchanan carried the standard against gay and lesbian rights. His demonization of homosexuality and attacks on same-sex marriage alarmed conservative voters about the homosexual threat and garnered support for his candidacy. Although in the end he did not win a large enough proportion to be a serious contender for the

nomination, none of the other Republican candidates apart from Richard Lugar offered even token opposition to Buchanan's fervent gay bashing.

The larger context of Buchanan's political and cultural war is American homo —the interlocking structures of homoeroticism and homophobia—the hegemony of heterosexuality as a cultural system. Currently, heterosexuality as a sex/gender paradigm organizes intellectual categories, as well as Americans' everyday experience of sexuality, gender, and reproduction. "Heterosexuality" as a hegemonic social formation is an ensemble of putatively stable social forms, institutions, and practices. Together, they structurally contain and neutralize oppositional movements and communities, such as feminism; the lesbian and gay movement; the campaign for reproductive rights; and the rights of transgendered, bisexual, and erotic minorities.^[17] Whereas any hegemonic social order is constantly renegotiated and is never conclusively established, "the heterosexual dictatorship" (to use a phrase of Christopher Isherwood's) has long succeeded in minimizing homosexuality's impact through religious teachings, social stigmatization, psychiatric and other medical therapies, and, in the most recent decades, direct political activity aimed at disenfranchising lesbians and gay men.

The lesbian and gay movement is transforming American social values and behavior. It has successfully organized its own sexual communities, which have allowed homosexuality and unconventional gender behavior of all forms to flourish. Although these developments have taken place unevenly and have constantly provoked conflict, the lesbian and gay movement has put homosexuality on America's political and cultural agenda.

Any sense of collective selfhood will always be contested, unstable, and full of unresolved differences. The social role designating a person as homosexual emerged in European-American cultures during the nineteenth century or even earlier. Even though homosexuality has existed in many societies and historical periods, the person who identifies as "homosexual" is a relatively recent creation. As with all such creations, this one will change and presumably disappear at some point. However transitory the historical character of the lesbian and gay identities,

it is impossible to overestimate the significance of gay and lesbian identity politics in the late twentieth century.