FOR A CENTURY or more, it seemed impossible for literary biography to acknowledge a subject’s homosexuality, and this was due in part to the reticence of some writers to allow an accurate record of their private life to circulate. Before his death, for example, Henry James systematically burned all of his private papers and encouraged friends to destroy any letters that he had written to them. W. H. Auden specified that no biography be written of him (an injunction that numerous biographers have since ignored).
A desire to maintain one’s privacy is understandable, particularly in periods when draconian legal measures punished homosexual activities or when any suggestion of personal unorthodoxy could permanently derail a writer’s career. From a later perspective, however, the protective re-fashioning of oneself as heterosexual that was undertaken by certain writers seems cowardly and, in some cases, farcical. Walt Whitman might celebrate in his poems the joys of “adhesiveness” with other men, but when the activist John Addington Symonds inquired too closely into his private life, Whitman protested that he’d sired six illegitimate children (no evidence of whom has ever been found). And, as W. Somerset Maugham’s biographer Ted Morgan has confirmed, Maugham deliberately fed false information concerning his sexuality to his first biographer, Richard Cordell, much to the latter’s subsequent exasperation. Yet when even Liberace could win a libel suit against a journalist who hinted that he was gay, it was dangerous for a biographer to challenge such claims to heterosexuality, at least while the subject was still living.
More troublesome has been the reticence of many subjects’ executors and/or descendants.
Finally, there has been the implicit censorship dictated by the economics of publishing. Shortly after he completed publication of his magisterial five-volume biography of Henry James, Leon Edel acknowledged to The Advocate that in the early volumes (starting in 1953) he’d been unable to allude even discreetly to the homoerotic element in James’ relationships with younger men. The nature of a biography is dictated in part by the information that a publisher is willing to risk putting into print. As late as 1972, when Edel completed his work, academic scholars, much less the general reading audience, were simply not ready to consider the possibility of a gay Henry James. The result is that, reinforced by the guardedness of his erstwhile supporters, James has come to be regarded as the quintessence of the closeted writer, particularly in comparison with his contemporary, Oscar Wilde. As Andrew Holleran wrote recently in these pages, “James has fallen on the wrong side of our feelings about the closet: Oscar Wilde is the hero when it comes to modern homosexuality.”
Stonewall and the New Openness
In the aftermath of Stonewall came a new insistence in gay culture on sexual frankness and openness. It was in this spirit that Allen Ginsberg, insisting that the poet always stands “naked” before the people, posed repeatedly in the nude—most famously with boyfriend Peter Orlovsky for Richard Avedon—and wrote frankly of his sexual desires in poems like “Please Master” and “Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass.” Novelist Edmund White followed the lead of Christopher Isherwood in blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, writing of himself in the third person and recounting with an almost brutal detachment the realities of his aging body, emotional compromises, and sexual humiliations. Felice Picano, after publishing two narratives as “a memoir in the form of a novel,” went on to write of the case of anal warts that limited his ability to have anal sex at a critical time in his psychosexual development—an accident that, he believes, saved him from HIV infection.
An unanticipated result of this newfound sexual openness has been an expectation of People magazine-like sexual disclosure in gay literary biography on a scale that has no heterosexual parallel. The unspoken reasoning seems to be that if gay lives are defined by their non-normative sex acts, then readers will feel entitled to a full disclosure of sexual details that they would never expect of a heterosexual writer. Thus, even though Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning exemplified heterosexual love for generations of readers, most would have been uncomfortable to learn the details of the Brownings’ sex life. Likewise, although Edna St. Vincent Millay fashioned herself as a woman who lived freely and loved passionately, no biographer has attempted to diagnose how her sexual imagination operated, much less speculate upon the dynamics of her most intimate relationships.
However, like the stains on hotel bed sheets that featured so prominently in the trials of Oscar Wilde, the intimate details of gay lives are now routinely scrutinized in biography—in large part, it must be emphasized, because the subjects themselves, in the spirit of post-Stonewall openness, have volunteered this information. Saul Bellow’s philandering is never analyzed as evidence of an outsider’s drive to assert himself in the bedroom when he felt uncomfortable in the drawing room; instead, lest the biographer appear anti-Semitic, it is glossed over as evidence of his joie de vivre. However, no analogous fear of appearing homophobic prevents biographers from scrutinizing philosopher Michel Foucault’s visits to the back rooms of San Francisco’s leather bars as evidence of a self-destructive pathology. And readers may learn in fairly explicit detail what Joe Orton did when he went “cottaging.”
One unanticipated effect of Stonewall’s politics of self-disclosure is the promotion of a literary voyeurism in which queer subjects risk being treated as animals on display in a sexual zoo. Readers are invited to witness the normally self-possessed Henry James’ stricken retreat from Horace Walpole’s sexual advance or Lorenz Hart cowering naked in a closet following a tryst. Ironically, many of the most cavalier of these anecdotes are supplied by a younger writer whose implicit boastfulness about his own sexual liberation comes at the expense of the better-known older figure. One might even define the “star-fucker narrative” as a sub-genre of gay literature in which the narrator is a younger, more virile and attractive male pursued by a pathetically conflicted older queen, with the narrative publicly circulated only after the latter’s death. Well might Samuel M. Steward seek to counter the whitewashing of Thornton Wilder’s sexuality in biographies that depended upon the goodwill of Wilder’s highly protective sister/executor by offering his own memoir of Wilder’s ejaculating after only ninety seconds of frottage. But Harold Norse’s extended narrative of W. H. Auden’s fumbling, unwelcome attempts at sex seems a case of Norse’s self-promotion at the expense of the brilliant but awkward poet.
The enduring paradox of Stonewall is that, by publicly fashioning a sexual self that resists being made to feel ashamed of its desires, many prominent gay writers have invited public scrutiny of the most intimate aspects of their existence. In general, the sexuality of a non-gay writer continues to be seen as only a part of his or her identity, even when the subject is a novelist like Philip Roth, famous for his provocative writings on sexual matters. Conversely, a gay person continues to be defined by society at large primarily by his sexual actions. Thus, because his or her sexuality is perceived as being only part of the non-gay writer’s existence, discretion is more likely to be employed when recounting that life. But simply to be identified as gay in the post-Stonewall period is to have one’s body placed on display with one’s sexual behaviors open to scrutiny.
What constitutes an invasion of privacy by even the most sensitive and respectful biographer? A double standard seems to exist for gay and straight subjects. In a society that continues to assume the normality of (most) heterosexual acts, it is considered poor taste to inquire too closely into what transpires in the heterosexual bedroom: no one asks if Ernest Hemingway enjoyed being spanked by Marlene Dietrich, or whether Lillian Hellman gave Dashiell Hammett head. Conversely, as long as a gay writer is identified in large part by what he does sexually, the supposedly abnormal must be detailed, whatever the violation of that person’s right to privacy.
AIDS and Sexual Privacy
The onset of AIDS made the post-Stonewall scrutiny of the gay male body all the more problematical, the pandemic having created two new challenges for the writer of gay literary biography.
One of the most daring scenes in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America involves Prior Walter stripping for his physician and slowly turning 360 degrees as the latter examines him for evidence of new Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions. In early productions, the scene was difficult to watch because it demanded that audiences look upon the body of a man weakened by AIDS, forcing them to acknowledge the physical disintegration of someone who was young and beautiful. At a number of the performances that I attended, many audience members turned away at this point in the drama, some no doubt embarrassed by the full frontal nudity of the actor, but more, I believe, because—as Susan Sontag argues in Regarding the Pain of Others—it’s difficult to look at length upon the pain of someone with whom one has come to identify.
The scene offers an analogy to the conundrum now faced by the biographer of a seropositive gay writer. Once it became certain that HIV was transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids, health authorities were determined to map how a person with AIDS contracted the virus, subjecting the gay male body to a more intrusive scrutiny than it had previously undergone. Not since John Donne charted the progress of his spotted fever in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions has biography or autobiography been so medically conscious, for if the body’s transformation by AIDS is evidence of the disease, and if sex is the cause, then the biographer must look closely at the sexual dynamic of the subject’s relationships, inquiring in the most pedestrian manner about who did what to whom and how often. At the same time, weakened by the virus and threatened by the hysteria aroused by bigots like William F. Buckley and Pat Buchanan, people with AIDS found themselves in desperate need of a guarantee of privacy. The sexualized gay male body put on display by Stonewall now needed to be protected from derisive or antagonistic scrutiny. Ironically, the medical privacy laws enacted to protect PWAs from discrimination on the basis of their condition have had the unintended effect of making it difficult for the biographer to access crucial medical records in order to confirm the oftentimes confused or hazy memories of surviving family and friends.
How, then, does the literary biographer negotiate between the Scylla of over-scrutinizing the virus-weakened body and the Charybdis of medical privacy laws designed to protect the privacy of PWAs? Permission to consult medical records may be granted by an executor, but this raises a second challenge to the literary biographer: the disappearance of executors in the wake of the epidemic. In too many cases, when a writer had moved to a metropolitan center like New York or San Francisco, he was part of a network of friends and literary associates a major portion of whom would likewise fall ill and die, or become so exhausted caring for the sick and dying that they had little time to exert themselves on behalf of a literary estate.
Take, for example, the case of Allen Barnett, author of The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories (1990). Commissioned to write the entry on Barnett for www.glbtq.com, I found next to no information on the Web that might help me flesh out the details of his life, much less any indication of where Barnett’s papers might be archived. I contacted St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s publisher, in the hope that they would share with me any personal information that Barnett had supplied the publicity department for the book’s press package. To my dismay, I learned that when St. Martin’s Press had been absorbed into a mega-publishing entity, its files were deposited in Brown University’s library, where they will not be accessible to researchers for another five years. I was encouraged to track down Barnett’s retired agent, who was willing to provide the contact information that he retained in his Rolodex for both Barnett’s mother and executor. This information, however, was more than fifteen years old; letters to each were returned as undeliverable, and subsequent attempts at locating either woman have failed. In the meantime, Keith Kahla, who succeeded Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s as director of its groundbreaking Stonewall Inn line of gay and lesbian books, asked me to alert him should I locate Barnett’s executor, as The Body and Its Dangers has been out of print for several years now and the executor must be consulted before a new edition can be issued. Thus, a major text no longer circulates, and the only biographical information that can be obtained on the author is what can be culled from interviews and the anecdotes of surviving friends.
Similar circumstances undoubtedly surround the estates of many other gay writers who succumbed to AIDS-related causes. Few were as fortunate as David Feinberg, the author of Eighty-Sixed (1989) and Spontaneous Combustion (1991), to have an executor astute enough to collect his papers—including photograph albums and scrapbooks—and to deposit them in the New York Public Library’s AIDS archive, much less to have a close friend like John Weir to describe their last days in a novel like What I Did Wrong (2006). More often, as appears to be the case of Allen Barnett, the executor settled the legal estate and, exhausted by the demands of caring for a friend in his last months, did not think of what needs to be done to preserve his literary legacy. I have nightmares of vulnerable writers’ papers being carried down to the curb to be collected on trash pick-up day by the relatives of a writer’s partner who outlived him only to die shortly thereafter himself. Non-literary friends have little idea how to care for a writer’s legacy, while the relatives of a dead writer’s partner are dealing with their own grief and are not likely to concern themselves with the boxes of papers they’ve found in a corner, seeing the latter simply as so much clutter in an apartment that must be vacated by month’s end.
Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English and coordinator of Asian Studies at the University of Central Arkansas.
