A Popular Sociology Of Homosexuality
During the 1950s and 1960s, popular sociology books frequently made the best-seller list. The Lonely Crowd (1950) by David Reisman, The Organization Man by William Whyte (1956), C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956), Robert Lindner's Must You Conform? (1956), Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Paul Goodman's Growing up Absurd (1960)—these books, which were all profoundly critical of the status
quo and conformism, had tremendous influence on the American politics and culture of the period. They all grew out of a deep sense of frustration and were motivated by the possibility of social change. All of them recognized the growing desire for social reform in American life. Homosexuality was ripe for popular sociology. From 1951 through 1968, the year before the Stonewall riots, almost a dozen books were published that portrayed the social world of the homosexual.[27] Addressed to the general public, these popular sociology books explored homosexuality as a social problem—"perhaps the most serious undiscussed problem in the United States today," in the words of Martin Hoffman, author of The Gay World .[28]
It's not at all clear whether academic sociology had any influence whatsoever on these books of popular sociology.[29] Several authors—for example, Donald Webster Cory and Martin Hoffman—may have been aware of the interactionist tradition in American sociology, which influenced the sociology of deviance during 1960s.[30] Whether they were aware of it or not, their books would easily have fit into that tradition.
The interactionist tradition in sociology seeks to explain human action as a result of the meanings that interacting people attach to actions and things. For example, symbolic interactionists (one of the most influential schools in this tradition) interpreted deviance "not [as] a quality of the act a person commits but rather [as] the consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender.'"[31] The interactionist tradition (going back to Georg Simmel, pragmatism, and George Herbert Mead) emphasizes sociation and interaction as the constitutive acts of the social.[32] This contrasts sharply with the concept of society that other authors expressed. For instance, Robert Lindner believed that all postwar forms of social life repressed "healthy" instinctual energies, and Jess Stern seemed to view social life as an ideal moral order threatened by deviant or decadent behavior.
Throughout this period, psychological works, which often treated homosexuality as an individualized pathological form of sexual behavior, remained the most influential nonfiction genre that addressed homosexuality for a general audience.[33] The new popular sociology approach marked a growing awareness that homosexual communities
existed in American cities. Among the popular sociology authors, both Donald Cory and Martin Hoffman knew that the existence and development of a gay social world implied something new and important about homosexuality.
Although two of the popular sociology books explored lesbian life, this discourse was preoccupied primarily with male homosexuality. The emphasis on male homosexuality reflected a widespread preoccupation in U.S. society with its implications for masculinity. An obsession with effeminacy and its significance in gay male life pervades all the books that address male homosexuality. These authors commonly viewed homosexual desires as a threat to a man's masculinity. Cory emphatically downplays the cultural presence of flamboyant effeminacy. The queen, he states "is a rarity even in gay circles."[34] He does go on, however, to create a loving portrait of drag balls.[35] Stern, on the other hand, constantly uses words such as "mincing," "swishing," and "sashaying" as if they were objective terms of description. Hoffman doesn't even refer to effeminacy as an issue. It is certain, though, that effeminacy, camp humor, and drag were prominent aspects of gay life in the 1950s and early 1960s. We also know that fear of effeminacy prohibited many men from acknowledging their homosexuality and entering the gay social world.
The first work to reveal the social world of homosexuals came, naturally enough, from within the homosexual community itself. Donald Webster Cory, the pseudonymous alter ego of Edward Sagarin (who later, ironically, became an extremely homophobic critic of gay liberation), published the first exploration of homosexual society in 1951. Between 1951 and 1964, Cory and his occasional collaborator John P. LeRoy published the four most thorough and sophisticated books about homosexual life to predate Stonewall. Cory's books covered the full range of gay life—relationships, the social origins of homophobia, the role of gay bars, the significance of the gay contribution to culture, and a critique of the psychological theory of homosexuality. Cory's books probably never reached a very large public because they were all published by small presses, although at least one, The Lesbian in America , was reprinted as a mass-market paperback by MacFadden Books in 1965.[36]
It would be interesting to know what concrete social situation existed in 1951 that enabled Donald Webster Cory to write and publish The Homosexual in America —the first work of American popular sociology on homosexuality. The pseudonym Donald Webster Cory was an inverted play on "Corydon," the title and main interlocutor of André Gide's dialogues in defense of homosexuality. Cory's book, an ambitious defense of the homosexual way of life, derives its strength from his fundamental belief that homosexual patterns of behavior are socially constructed. Moreover, Cory quite self-consciously views the existence of a gay social world as the necessary foundation of homosexuals' happiness.[37] In his concluding chapter, he directly addresses his fellow homosexuals. "Do not fear the group life of the gay world," is one of his most ardent pleas. "In the gay life," he urges us, "you can be yourself and form friendships with those who know what you are and who accept you and love you. … The group life is not a thing of shame, a den of iniquity. It is a circle of protection, a necessary part of a minority society."[38]
But even such a profoundly sociological approach could not escape the hegemony of psychiatric discourse. In The Homosexual in America , Cory engages in a dialogue with mainstream American society and confronts its homophobia (a word not yet at his disposal). Although he addresses his fellow gay men (and to a much lesser extent lesbians), he devotes considerable energy to challenging the discourse of psychiatry. Over and over again, Cory takes on notions about homosexuals that derive from psychiatry—the causes of homosexuality, whether it is possible to cure homosexuals, whether sublimation allows people to avoid a homosexual way of life—and offers many strong and cogent criticisms of the psychiatric arguments.
If Cory displays any ambivalence, it is in the way he dismisses certain aspects of gay life that he finds negative. His discussion of effeminacy overlooks the cultural centrality of camp, and he dismisses as a stereotype the importance of queens in the gay life of the 1940s and 1950s. He glosses over the significance of alcoholism. There is no discussion at all of potentially embarrassing topics, such as sexually transmitted diseases or public sex in restrooms. The major tragedy of gay life is, in Cory's view, the need for concealment. He interprets many of
the psychological characteristics and social patterns of gay life as resulting from the stigma and the need for secrecy.
In the middle of this twenty-year publishing arc, Jess Stern produced The Sixth Man (on male homosexuality) and The Grapevine (on lesbians). They were published by Doubleday, one of the largest American publishing houses at that time. They also both appeared in mass-market paperback form. A former reporter for the New York Daily News and an editor of Newsweek , Jess Stern claimed that his study of male homosexuals, The Sixth Man , "is as unbiased a report … as a disinterested reporter could make it."[39] Despite his stated intention to adopt a neutral journalistic approach, however, Stern's books displayed ambivalence, hypocrisy, and contempt toward homosexuals.
With a false liberalism, he set out to report on "the everyday aspects of the homosexual's world—his social adjustment to himself, his job, his friends, and his family—but even more importantly, perhaps, the non-homosexual's problem with him."[40] Homosexuality, in Stern's view, was a tragedy for homosexuals and society. The homosexual world, he wrote, was "a glittering make-believe world—at times tragic, sometimes ludicrous, even comical." The dire aspect of gay life was so apparent to him that he announced, "I had yet to meet a truly happy homosexual."[41] This very idea of tragedy encapsulated the moralistic liberal's patronizing expression of sympathy and contempt.
Stern set his exploration of the new gay social world within the grand narrative of "the Decline of the West."[42] Virtually every chapter recounted the negative impact of homosexuality on American life. Stern devoted several chapters to the role of homosexuals in the fashion industry. These were the most vicious chapters in the book. He believed that homosexuals had an overwhelmingly bad influence on the fashion industry; in his view, they promoted fashion models who were beautiful but too thin and flat-chested, all because homosexuals hated women and wanted them to look like boys.[43] Other chapters examined the impact of homosexuals on the entertainment, white-collar, and fitness industries, as well as the marriages of closeted gay men to unsuspecting women. Everywhere, from his perspective, the presence of homosexuals undermined the norms of gender roles and sexual decency because homosexuals were secretive and vindictive.
Stern was not always able to shape his material to reflect his gloomy, conspiratorial vision, however. Occasionally, he encountered a gay person who was not ambivalent about being a homosexual, but he attempted to use such examples to demonstrate homosexuals' antisocial ethos. At one point, he interviewed a "typical American college boy" whom he found it difficult to believe was gay: "His face looked out alertly, a slight smile playing on sensitive lips. His hair a crewcut, his eyes clear. …" His conversation with the college boy, Frank, could almost be a dialogue between a young gay militant of the 1990s with a tough-minded liberal from the 1950s.
I'm quite happy being a homosexual. I don't want to be anything else.
He seemed amused. "You remind me of my father," he said.
I pointed out that I had understood he actually was not a confirmed homosexual, and could go either way. "You certainly don't look the part," I said.
"You mean," he said almost mockingly, "I have a chance."
He seemed to be enjoying himself. "If instead of trying to help us, people would just leave us alone, there would be no problem. …"
"If everybody felt like you," I said, "it might be the end of the human race."
"And what would be so horrible about that?" he asked with an engaging grin. "After all, if everything we read is true, we're on the verge of destruction any day, anyway."
Don't you feel there's a certain morality involved?
I don't see how I'm being immoral by being with somebody who wants to be with me. There's no force or coercion, and I am not picking on small children.
… "Don't you ever wonder whether you're kidding yourself?"
His eyes went blank. "I don't understand."
Actually, haven't you chosen a way of life which is wrong, for purely selfish reasons, and are now trying to justify it philosophically?
He smiled almost pityingly. "Why should I have to justify it at all?"[44]
This young college student prefigured a new generation of homosexual men who were more and more visible in the books and magazines of the 1960s.
One of the most important contributions to the new discourse that built on the discovery of the social was Hendrik Ruitenbeek's anthology The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society , which Dutton published as a widely available quality paperback original. It captured perfectly the period's ambivalent mix of psychoanalysis and sociology. Ruitenbeek's anthology republished a series of classic psychoanalytic essays by Sandor Ferenczi, Abram Kardiner, and Clara Thompson on the theory of homosexuality. It also included Freud's famous and very positive statement, "Letter to an American Mother" about her son's homosexuality, Simone de Beauvoir's chapter from The Second Sex called "The Lesbian," and Evelyn Hooker's pathbreaking article on the psychologically well-adjusted homosexual; this was one of the only times (perhaps the sole instance) that one of Hooker's articles was made available to a broad public. The anthology also included a number of articles giving sociological descriptions of the homosexual community, as well as several pieces on hustlers and George Devereux's classic study of institutionalized homosexuality among the Mohave Indians. Although Ruitenbeek's anthology had a more intellectual tone than any of the other popular sociology books, it was widely available in paperback.
Toward the end of the period immediately before the Stonewall riots, Martin Hoffman's The Gay World appeared. Appropriately enough, in light of the political developments taking place then, Martin Hoffman's The Gay World is primarily set in San Francisco in 1966.[45] In addition to being the only one of these books to use the term gay in the title, it was also published in a widely circulated mass-market paperback format that still shows up frequently in secondhand bookstores. Like the work of Robert Lindner and many of these popular sociology books (except for the work of Donald Cory), The Gay World is an amalgam of sociological observation and psychiatric expertise. It offers a fairly positive account of gay social life—tinged only with a concern for the difficult and sad state of affairs that homosexuals must experience.
Popular sociology represented the discovery by both homosexuals and nonhomosexuals of an image of the gay social world—an imagined community. Both kinds of people read these books and articles "to find themselves" through a process of either identification or counteridentification.
They read these works to sort out their relation to the imagined homosexual world of American society in the 1950s and 1960s. In many of these works, particularly those by authors who were not openly homosexual, even those that represented themselves as sympathetic, homosexuals' lives were presented as tortured and unfulfilled, at the very least because of social oppression.
Reading such an ambivalent discourse generated "misrecognitions" for the individual undergoing a process of homosexual identity formation.[46] There were several different types of gay readers. Many, probably most, of the male homosexuals who were already familiar with the gay social world had found it by going to bars, by cruising parks and toilets, and through friends. The vast majority of homosexuals, however, were isolated and asocial members of the homosexual minority—they were in the closet. These closeted gay men used the popular sociology, literary, and psychoanalytic discourses to name themselves, describe themselves, judge themselves—and, by these means, to homosexualize themselves.