Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall

Men without Maps

Men without Maps

Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall

John Ibson

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65608-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65611-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65625-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226656250.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ibson, John, author.

Title: Men without maps : some gay males of the generation before stonewall / John Ibson.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019005771 | ISBN 9780226656083 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226656113 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226656250 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Gay men—United States—History—20th century. | Gay couples—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HQ76.3.U6 I27 2019 | DDC 306.76/620973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005771

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my fellow graduate students and their dear ones in History of American Civilization at Brandeis a mere fifty years ago

Contents

Introduction: Together and Alone—Self-Definition without Many Models

PART 1   The Real Outlaws: The Male Couple before Gay Liberation

PART 2   Solitary Men: Loneliness and Masculinity

Afterword: Darkness before Dawn—Being a Gay Male in Midcentury America

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

Together and Alone—Self-Definition without Many Models

Of the Bible’s many problematic proclamations, few are as wrongheaded as the insistence in Ecclesiastes 1:9 that what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Indeed, today it seems that virtually every sunrise illuminates something somewhere vastly different than its predecessor of the day before. When the biblical passage was composed, of course, human life was hugely more stable in its structural arrangements and cultural meanings—not only day by day, but from decade to decade, even century to century—than has been the case in much of the world since the Industrial Revolution. But as much as modern history chronicles change, it also records substantial continuity and fierce resistance to change. Helping ensure continuity is cultural transmission from one generation to the next, a crucial way that humans learn what to think and do, how to be in the world, in part from various modeling figures throughout their lives. As one of the erudite monkeys observes in Planet of the Apes, Human see, human do.

The absence or avoidance of such behavioral models and of other sources of cultural information can itself produce significant change, requiring imagination, resourcefulness, even courage, as people more or less on their own move outside previous paradigms of thought and action. Men without Maps is a book about a large number of American men in the middle decades of the twentieth century who displayed an abundance of courage and creativity as they constructed lives, and an identity for themselves, that acknowledged their sexual attraction to other males—and did so having had precious little affirmative modeling or guidance of any sort, instead mostly encountering scorn, from the society in which they had come of age. This is a book about men who lived largely without, or for whom there was little direct resonance within, the cultural maps that were provided in such conspicuous ubiquity through the first half of the twentieth century to males and females sexually attracted to each other. These maps for men and women were guides provided by their own parents; by powerful social institutions such as the medical profession, schools, and churches; in countless works of fiction and nonfiction alike; and by virtually every agent of popular culture, in music, the movies, and advertisements, on the radio, and eventually by the early situation comedies on television. Pervasively, American culture throughout the twentieth century’s first half had been no less than basic training for life as a heterosexual. The maps for that were all over the place, free for the asking, and were provided, forcefully at times, even to those for whom they were wholly inappropriate.

This book’s very title, with its map metaphor, requires some qualification, best noted here, at the outset. Regardless of the direction of one’s desire, so powerful was the cultural emphasis on heterosexuality during the first half (and more) of the twentieth century that few could escape it, leaving the men in this book not exactly without maps, but largely without guidance that took into account, to say nothing of honoring or encouraging, their particular needs and yearnings. One might better speak of relative maplessness, cumbersome as that term might be, or might meaningfully point to the negative maps provided by those many who denounced queerness, the clandestine maps available in certain queer spaces, or the surreptitious maps provided by such sources as men’s bodybuilding magazines or pen pal clubs.¹ Not merely an author’s liking of alliteration has inspired this book’s title: The heterosexual hegemony during the period encompassed by this book makes its title apt. When it came to maps of their own, openly distributed and consulted, gay men mostly went without until the 1970s and later.

My focus is on gay males in the United States of the generation before Stonewall, men who put together their lives and their sense of self during the half century or so of tremendous cultural ferment—accelerating modernization, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War—that took place before the burgeoning of the gay rights movement across the country in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The men in this book lived at a time when an individual’s very identity, sexually speaking—in a society increasingly focused on sex—had largely come to be determined externally, by the sex of those with whom the individual desired to have sexual involvement. The implications of that identity for heterosexuals was a matter of endless public discourse, but for homosexuals the implications were mostly a matter of secrecy, silence, speculation, or shame. To be sure, life for gay men in America did not suddenly become a bed of roses from the 1970s onward, but the role models and cultural information available to them did increase greatly during that later time.

The relative absence of information and models that I am calling maps for men attracted to each other should not be confused with a lack of opportunity for sexual contact between persons of the same sex. Such opportunities to have sex, of course, have existed throughout human history and were in no short supply for men in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. But when an activity is scorned by a society’s dominant culture, the activity typically must be furtive, accompanied by varying degrees of punishment, ridicule, guilt, secrecy, and shame—and for some, of course, also by the excitement of risk taking, even by finding pleasure in misbehavior. How-to manuals, literal or figurative, are not provided—except in indirect, inadvertent ways, typically as part of denunciations. Though historians have been properly skeptical in recent years about the actual impact of advice literature—a type of map—the content and availability of such literature on a particular topic is nonetheless important cultural evidence, an index of attitudes, if not of behavior. The complete absence of such literature, which defines the midcentury situation for gay men, is revealing as well. David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison’s The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop, the first work of its kind published in the United States, appeared in 1984 and has been followed by numerous similar works, to say nothing of the countless works on other queer topics in history, literature, and psychology that have appeared in recent decades. Not one book like The Male Couple was available, however, indeed such a book was unimaginable, for the men without maps of a slightly earlier generation. In individual instances, a more experienced relative, friend, or sexual partner might provide guidance or even become something of a model, but such was the force of the antagonism against queerness in the country’s dominant culture of the time that midcentury queer males were often on their own in navigating their desire.

Guidance might come from one’s own neighbors, if a male were to live in one of the sections of a few large American cities in which gay men were comparatively welcome and numerous, areas that had been growing since the century’s early years, one of the zones of gay camaraderie and security so meticulously described for New York City by George Chauncey. Particular sites within those zones—restaurants, bars, apartment and boarding houses, parks, and baths—became queer spaces, places where information and guidance about being gay was readily available. Of particular importance in New York City and elsewhere were certain YMCAs; in Chauncey’s words, It was at the Y that many newcomers to the city made their first contacts with other gay men.² For those who were unable or unwilling to move to, or even visit, someplace like New York’s East Fifties and Sixties, Greenwich Village, or Chelsea, though, the sense of isolation could be profound. Service in World War II often offered men of various sexual inclinations a substantial release from the constrictions of civilian life in the company of kindred spirits, but the culture of postwar America was freshly restrictive regarding men’s intimacy of any sort, a cruel irony I recently explored in The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men.³ Being a leader or simply a member in the early homophile movement for gay and lesbian rights, between the end of the war and the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, was, of course, a valuable experience in mapmaking, but such activity was confined to relatively few American men with sexual yearnings for other males.⁴

In those maps provided in such abundance to heterosexuals, there was an overwhelming emphasis on pairing off, with marriage and parenthood as the much-preferred eventual result of the coupling, especially in the years immediately following the Second World War. Ever since Americans in the late eighteenth century had begun to leave their parents’ farms in large numbers, lured to burgeoning cities by greater economic opportunity and often by freedom from the control of family, church, and local elites, however, the age-old imperative in agrarian societies to reproduce children as the cheapest source of farm labor lost its force altogether, as did the economic rationale for marriage to someone with whom one might produce the little future laborers. These migrants to America’s cities were joined, beginning especially in the nineteenth century, by those leaving farms from as disparate places as Ireland and China and by those leaving the shtetls of eastern Europe and the rural poverty and bigotry of the post-slavery South. Of course, pairing off, marriage, and reproduction can for some people have benefits that outweigh their economic drawbacks in urban, industrial settings. What is remarkable is that both pairing off and parenthood retained tremendous cultural power, as if most Americans were still living in a little house on the prairie, long after such ceased to be the case. Further, pairing off and parenting retained their popularity alongside numerous incidents of dysfunction, a too-polite word for misery, even abuse, between spouses and between parents and children in modern America.⁵ So centered on coupling was American culture, and such were the satisfactions of keeping regular company with someone of one’s own choosing, that pairing off not only had appeal for those who chose not to reproduce but might also even appeal to those for whom reproduction together was biologically impossible—among them persons of the same sex. One might speak in this regard of borrowed maps that had at best indistinct details.

In a process commonly seen as beginning only in the late nineteenth century, persons sexually attracted to those of their own sex were given a distinct and largely scorned identity as homosexuals in American culture. Homosexual, a word not even coined, first in German, until 1869, originally described only an activity, not a person. Even before—perhaps especially before—the birth of that identity in American culture, persons for whom reproduction was not a priority could pair off with a member of their own sex, for a short while or a lifetime, or could at least dream of doing so.⁶ For some of these same-sex couples, mutual sexual satisfaction was surely a part of the arrangement, while probably for others it was not. For young South Carolinians James H. Hammond and Thomas Jefferson Withers, later important figures in the Confederacy, for instance, there had been exuberant sexual activity that apparently was so unburdened by guilt that Withers could write thusly in an 1826 letter to Hammond that recalled their frolicking of a few years earlier: I feel some inclination to learn, Withers wrote,

whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole—the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?⁷

No less a figure than the fifteenth president of the United States, James Buchanan, and the nation’s thirteenth vice president, William Rufus de Vane King, lifelong bachelors both, lived together in Buchanan’s home for fifteen years when they were senators. The president’s nieces destroyed the two men’s correspondence after Buchanan’s 1868 death, though an 1844 letter survived from when King left to become the American ambassador to France. I am now solitary and alone, having no companion in the house with me, Buchanan told King. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. Their living arrangement and its implications did not go unnoticed; but while Andrew Jackson, for instance, reportedly called Buchanan and King Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy, the ridicule did not hamper either King’s or Buchanan’s rise to the top, in that era before the notion of fixed sexual identity and the accompanying scorn heaped on homosexuals had become part of American culture.⁸ A towering figure in antebellum America, Daniel Webster, lived with his dear friend James Hervey Bingham when they were Dartmouth undergraduates; and though Webster eventually married, he wrote Bingham after their graduation about their living together again, for good:

we will yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough. . . . We perhaps shall never be rich; no matter we can supply our own personal necessities. By the time we are thirty we shall put on the dress of old bachelors, a mourning suit, and having sown all our wild oats, with a round hat and a hickory staff we will march on to the end of life, whistling as merry as robins.⁹

Even if Webster was being wholly fanciful, the utterly unself-conscious tenor of his comments is striking. The inherently sexual and transgressive connotations that would later accompany such a proposal were still a century or so away, in this era that Jonathan Ned Katz has aptly termed the time before homosexuality.¹⁰

The unself-conscious quality of both Withers’s expression of lust and Webster’s evocation of intimacy surely became much less likely when the notion of oriented sexuality and the stigmatizing of homosexuality became implanted more firmly in American culture as the twentieth century progressed. Both male parties to a sexual relationship, regardless of one’s positioning during intercourse, came widely to be seen as unmanly perverts, indeed breakers of the law. Once it had been only the male whose mouth or anus was penetrated who was scorned, for acting the receptive role of a woman, with his sexual partner commonly viewed as someone simply exercising his privilege as a man; by the twentieth century’s early decades, however, both partners were typically seen as deviants.¹¹ Even with wartime’s tremendous manpower needs, men such as these were declared unfit for military service during the Second World War, though that new policy was inconsistently enforced while the war lasted. In the fearful climate following the war, however, in a bizarre union of anti-Communism and homohatred, the demonizing of homosexuality in American society reached its apex. Having gay sex, being seen as gay, to say nothing of being involved in an actual relationship with another person of one’s own sex, had for generations been increasingly stigmatized, targeted for fear and loathing throughout American society, across all boundaries of class, race, and region. By midcentury, except within certain regional niches of gay community and among coworkers in certain occupations that likely were disproportionately gay (such as airline stewards and some branches of the arts), there were virtually no affirmative, directly applicable guidelines or widely acknowledged role models readily available for persons attracted to their own sex who were trying to carve out an identity and establish a way of life that recognized that attraction.¹²

Despite the fluctuating but ongoing cultural power of pairing off, remaining uncoupled has not been without appeal to some American males, especially late in the nineteenth century and also in our own time, as a temporary state anticipating marriage or some other form of coupling, or instead as a state that might be lifelong—for men attracted to women, those attracted to both sexes, and those attracted to other males.¹³ Homosexuality’s increasing stigmatization in the twentieth century’s first half was probably a factor in the dominant culture’s emerging characterization of the bachelor as a roguish playboy, his boundless sexual appetite for women an overcompensating reassurance that this unattached male was thoroughly heterosexual, no queer he. The cultural maps provided to him may have charted just one narrow and superficial sort of journey, but he was at least given a guide; if the models provided by, say, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy were snobby, materialistic, misogynists, they were at least models to be embraced mostly without shame.¹⁴

The heterosexuality of the Playboy bachelor, like the sexuality of the magazine’s coupled reader, was not simply assumed, it was steadfastly insisted upon. The fierce insistence on readers’ heterosexuality might be missing in the nation’s many other men’s magazines, such as Esquire, True, Argosy, Sports Illustrated, and Popular Mechanics, but their straightness was uniformly assumed and often promoted nonetheless.

By contrast, there was no American magazine devoted to persons with same-sex desires until ONE appeared in 1953. Though the publication’s circulation never exceeded five thousand copies per month through the early 1960s, sharing surely put an individual copy into more than one man’s hands; but the number