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4.5
Robert Corber, who has taught in the American Studies and Gay and Lesbian Studies programs at Trinity College here in Hartford, examines works by Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin in order "to try to establish the importance of a group of gay male writers whose cultural politics have been misunderstood." Corber's main premise is that a post-World War II "crisis of masculinity" produced, in the1950s, a model of masculinity stressing domesticity and cooperation which gradually became hegemonic. Corber explains that "the successful negotiation of the corporate hierarchy depended less on personal ambition and personal initiative than on respect for authority, loyalty to one's superiors, and the ability to get along with others - all qualities traditionally associated with femininity."Corber first provides a lengthy, incisive discussion of film noir, the genre of gritty detective stories popular in this era. According to Corber: "Inspired by the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich," film noir presented a "pessimistic view of American society." In particular interest, according to Corber "postwar film in general tended to ratify the homophobic categories of Cold War political discourse. The discources of national security tried to exploit fears that there was no way to tell homosexuals from heterosexuals." Corber explains: "The possibility that gay men could escape detection by passing as straight linked them in the Cold War political imaginary to the Communists who were allegedly conspiring to overthrow the government." As a result, in Corber's view: "The unusual presence in film noir of characters who are explicitly identified as gay can be attributed to male homosexual panic." The early-Cold War popularity of film noir, according to Corber, indicates that the American public accepted the genre's sexual politics. According to Corber, "the hard-boiled detective's refusal to participate in the traditionally female spheres of domesticity and consumption is expressed visually in his association with unkempt offices and seedy boardinghouses. His disheveled appearance makes clear that he has been able to resist the lure of the commodity. By contrast, the gay male characters' association with luxurious surroundings suggests that they occupy the same position in relation to the commodity form as the femme fatale. Wholly immersed in commodity culture, they are the antithesis of the hardworking, self-denying entrepreneur." Corber is a master of literary criticism, and his analysis of Williams, Vidal, and Baldwin must be read in its entirety to be appreciated. But I do want to introduce readers of this review to the type of insight which Corber provides. He writes that Tennessee Williams was criticized because "whereas Williams did not hesitate to deal openly with the gay male experience in his short stories and poetry, he refused to do so in his plays because they reached a broader audience and might expose his homosexuality to public scrutiny." According to Corber: "This argument positions Williams as a casualty of the closeted gay male subculture of the fifties." However, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Corber observes that "Big Daddy tries to convince [his son Brick] that he has no reason to feel ashamed of being homosexual." Corber notes that "the chief obstacle to Brick's inheriting the estate is his failure to produce an heir." Corber explains: "Brick's desire to remain in the closet indicates that he is unwilling to repress his homosexuality in exchange for securing his claims to the estate." Corber observes: "Brick makes love with Maggie at the end of the play not because he has undergone a moral transformation and is no longer homosexual but because he refuses to relinquish the protection afforded by the closet." Corber's reading of this classic of American drama is exceptionally good. Corber's analysis of Gore Vidal's "controversial novel" The City and the Pillar, in which the "treatment of the of the gay male subculture was clearly intended to contest the dominant understanding of gay male desire," also is impressive. In Vidal's own words, he "set out to shatter the stereotype [that male homosexuality was confined for the most part tp interior decorators and ballet dancers] by taking as [his] protagonist a completely ordinary boy of the middle class." According to Corber, Vidal "hoped that by observing the gay male subculture through the eyes of an `ordinary' middle-class boy, he could dismantle the binary logic of sexual difference, a logic that made homosexuality seem `unnatural.'" Corber explains that Vidal attempted "to define a male subject-position that is not only homosexual but also masculine." According to Corber, "the gay macho style represents the use of an oppositional form of masculinity that first emerged in the fifties as a means of staging a desire that does not conform to the domesticated values of the white suburban middle class." For instance, the character "Bob," according to Vidal, "perceives his responsibilities to his family as incompatible with his manhood. He seems to think that providing for his family necessitates becoming an `organization man' who submits to a corporate hierarchy." Corber's ultimate purpose is to "show that the roots of the gay liberation movement lay in gay male opposition to the Cold War consensus" and to challenge "the tendency of historians" to treat the Fifties "as the Dark Ages of gay male identity and politics." In Corber's view, Williams, Vidal, and Baldwin "laid the foundation for the gay liberation movement."Some readers will find Corber's focus too narrow. In my opinion, Corber only touched on the concept that, during the early Cold War, homosexuality was equated with Communism and left-wing subversion in order to marginalize and suppress gay male subculture. The question, of course, is: Why? The 1950s in the United States was an era of great anxiety, and many Americans were searching for enemies in order to vent their multi-faceted frustrations. According to Corber, "the Cold War construction" characterized "the homosexual" as a subversive who had be exposed because he was secretly undermining the nation's morality. Corber has a creative and deeply-penetrating intelligence. Taken on its own terms, this book is superb.
