WHEN HAS SOMEONE truly “made it” as a writer? When he or she is included in an authoritative anthology, of course. Such an anthology answers the question, “Who were the most important writers of a given age?” For the millions of current and ex-students whose primary engagement with literature is a required survey class, anthologies are what literature is. These tomes float from dorm room to home library, proof that their owner is an educated person. You were wondering whether I knew 17th-century Spanish poetry? There’s the anthology on the third shelf.
When the time came for me to choose a text to teach for my first survey course, I took the selection process very seriously. I vaguely knew that there were two primary anthologies for the 20th century—The Norton Anthology of American Literature, which I assumed would be old-fashioned, and The Heath Anthology of American Literature, which I understood to be the “cool” alternative. “I hear the Heath is more diverse,” advised a professor who had been in my dissertation group. “Much better than the Norton,” affirmed a colleague. As I was going to teach a class in American literature after World War II, and as a broad range is particularly important with recent literature because the canon is so unsettled, I tentatively decided on the Heath. But when I got my desk copy, I was appalled.
The Heath Anthology is in fact impressively diverse.
The Heath’s vision of minority communities does not, however, include the GLBT community. The “tectonic upheavals that permeated the decades of the 1960’s and 1970’s” do not include Stonewall, and the “lines that society had drawn to regulate how people walked through the world” do not include sexuality. The Heath’s overview of American history after World War II offers gay people literally one mention: a note that the politics of the 1960’s and 70’s fought “not only racism and classism but also sexism, homophobia, and their intersections.” Hey, thanks! Unfortunately, it’s not surprising that the Heath does not acknowledge Stonewall and does not put gay and lesbian liberation into context with other liberation movements.
What is surprising is that the Heath frequently consigns gay and lesbian authors to the closet, often not mentioning their sexuality at all or barely mentioning it, while rarely acknowledging the relevance of their sexuality to their art. Elizabeth Bishop—who is also totally closeted in the Norton—offers a good example. The Heath relates Bishop’s family history in some detail, as well as her ties to Marianne Moore and May Swenson, without mentioning that all three women were queer, which was part of their bond. This elision is even more profound with Bishop’s personal life. Bishop’s decision to live for most of her adult life in Brazil is explained entirely in terms of removal “from the stresses and competitiveness of the New York literary world,” and her sixteen-year domestic partnership with a woman is alluded to as obliquely as it would have been in the 1950’s: “[Bishop] was able to live a life of tropical remove with her Brazilian friend, Lota Costallat de Macedo Soares.” C. K. Doreski, who introduces Bishop, recapitulates the homophobia of her lifetime and never considers its impact on her life or her art.
The Heath’s neglect of Bishop’s personal life might be less objectionable if the anthology were unconcerned with personal lives in general, but the (heterosexual) details of the overwhelming majority of the 140 writers included in the anthology are fully related. Consider the seven poets included in the Heath who were Bishop’s contemporaries. Students read about Theodore Roethke’s marriage and how a “former student of his and also a former fashion model” both supported him and was an inspiration for several of his “most significant works”; the marital rondelet of Robert Lowell; the heterosexual histories of Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Charles Olson. The personal lives of only two poets go unmentioned: Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel Rukeyser, who—surprise!—was also a lesbian. Other GLBT poets whose personal lives are either passed over in silence or erased of their queerness include John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich. The message to students is that only heterosexual relationships deserve acknowledgment, while same-sex relationships should be hidden and minimized.
This disrespect to individual writers’ orientation is extended to larger questions of what writers are included in the anthology. While I don’t begrudge the editors’ careful attention to racial and ethnic diversity, I object to their exclusion of GLBT writers. For instance, the Heath identifies nine of its authors as Puerto Rican: Rane Arroyo, Víctor Hernández Cruz, Tato Laviera, Aurora Levins Morales, Nicholasa Mohr, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Pedro Pietri, and the team of Sandra María Esteves and Luz María Umpierre. Through these nine artists, the Heath presents a fairly full portrait of both the community and its letters, from writers born in Puerto Rico to first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to the continental U.S, from the Nuyorican poets to writers from other parts of the mainland States, from writers who identify with the African-American community and writers who identity as Jewish, from writers who work in traditional Puerto Rican poetic forms to writers who respond primarily to trends in contemporary poetry to writers who write fiction for a mass-market, young adult audience. The nine authors are treated as a coherent group in the various introductions, and relationships and æsthetic influences among them as a group are carefully noted, as are their various relationships with the Puerto Rican and other ethnic communities. For an anthology that attempts to cover all American literature since World War II, this is impressively thorough, and indicates to students that Puerto Ricans are an important, coherent, notable, respectable force in American letters.
One of these writers, Rane Arroyo, is one of the two writers in the anthology that I believe was included to indicate diversity in terms of sexuality. Lawrence La Fountain Stokes notes that Arroyo was a “self-professed gay writer” and acknowledges “his longstanding relationship with the poet Glenn Sheldon.” La Fountain Stokes also relates Arroyo’s sexuality to his work, observing that Arroyo was “constantly grappling with what it means to be a poet marked by racial, sexual, and linguistic difference.” In addition, the poems included from Arroyo directly touch on not only homosexual but transgendered themes. A similar effort is made by Kelly Lynch Reames for Dorothy Allison, whose work is acknowledged for its lesbian content and for the poet’s interest in publishing within the lesbian community. Reames even presents Allison’s place in queer letters by noting that “given Allison’s subject matter, it is not surprising that among the writers she credits as influences are … James Baldwin … Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, [and]Muriel Rukeyser.” This lineage is the only time when the Heath grants queer letters the same recognition and legitimacy that it routinely offers literatures organized around race and ethnicity.
Apart from the entries for Arroyo and Allison, however, no other effort is made to represent the gay and lesbian community. No context is offered for gay and lesbian history equivalent to those histories provided for ethnic and racial communities. No archival work is conducted. There is no inclusion of historically important queer writers such as Ann Bannon, Leslie Feinberg, or Andrew Holleran, who write from and bear witness to important moments in gay and lesbian history. Nor is there any inclusion of current writers like Luis Alfaro, Dennis Cooper, T. Cooper, Samuel Delaney, Mark Doty, Tony Kushner, Sarah Schulman, or Edmund White. And there are no transgendered authors whatsoever. Important GLBT writers who are not included in the Heath anthology but are included in the Norton include John Cheever and James Merrill; important queer writers not included in either include Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, and May Sarton. Apart from Arroyo and Allison, those who made the anthology did so by virtue of either: 1) their undeniable importance to the development of post-World War II literature (in which case the importance of their sexual orientation to their work is either ignored or minimized); or 2) another identity category, in which case their sexuality is similarly glossed over.
As we have seen, there are many examples of prominent gay writers who are included but closeted by the Heath, such as James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. This reluctance extends even to Tennessee Williams, one of the most important writers of the 20th century, whose homosexuality pervades his work and is essential to any reading of his œuvre. Yet the Heath, while remaining completely silent on the homosexuality of Williams’ life and work, does see fit to mention he had a “domineering mother and physically and psychically fragile sister.” By contrast, the Norton notes that Williams “actively explored the homosexual world,” and that he was frequently attacked for his sexual orientation.
The one author whose homosexuality is adequately respected by the Heath is Allen Ginsberg, whose long poem Howl is noted for its challenge to “restrictions on art and sexual expression.” Ginsberg’s introduction mentions his lover, Peter Orlovksy, by name (the only reference to a same-sex domestic partner besides Arroyo’s). In addition, in its general introduction to the Beat Poets, the Heath also observes that they “forced on the reading public an awareness of … homosexual and lesbian sexualities.” I find it somewhat heartening that even the Heath was forced to acknowledge that homosexuality was central to Ginsberg and his work. And yet, the Heath fails to consider Ginsberg’s work in terms of his homosexuality, even when such consideration is essential. This is the poet who ended “America” with the very familiar line, “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” Yet there are no annotations for the copious gay particulars of “America” and “Howl,” which are included in the anthology.
Similarly, the Heath annotates “A Supermarket in California,” which Ginsberg addresses to Walt Whitman, without noting the queer bond between the poets. Yet Ginsberg directly alludes to this bond when he sees Whitman as a “lonely old grubber … eyeing the grocery boys” and asking these boys, “Are you my Angel?” The gay connotations are not necessarily obvious to a non-gay audience (they certainly weren’t to most of my students) and should be footnoted, like other such details. The reader will not be surprised to learn that the Heath similarly ignores the sexuality of García Lorca, another patron of Ginsberg’s supermarket: “and you, García Lorca,/ what were you doing down by the watermelons?” An annotation notes that Lorca died in the Spanish Civil War—a detail that is much less important in this context than Lorca’s sexuality, and the fact that Ginsberg is referencing Lorca’s own poem about queer Whitman, “A Poet in New York.”
Gay people of color do not escape this silent treatment. Consider James Baldwin, whose personal life is passed over in silence. Instead, we learn that Baldwin’s writing “dealt with … homosexuality (among white characters), racial and sexual identities, problems of the Civil Rights Movement, life in Harlem, and religion.” That’s it. And it’s odd that in this brief space the author took pains to reassure readers that Baldwin did not write about homosexuality among people of color—which is incorrect, of course. There are black men who sleep with men in three of Baldwin’s six novels—Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, and Just Above My Head— and Just Above My Head is primarily concerned with sex and love between black men, and the imbrications of racism and homophobia. By contrast, the Norton directly states that Baldwin’s “interest in what it means to be black and homosexual is most fully and interestingly expressed in his third novel, Another Country.” To be fair, the Heath does note Baldwin’s “bisexuality” in its overall introduction to post-1945 American literature. Even this, however, is a denial of Baldwin’s essential identity as a gay man, one whose early, failed experiments with heterosexuality have been confirmed by the writer’s biographers.* Other writers of color whose homosexuality or bisexuality is elided by the Heath include Alice Walker and Richard Rodriguez.
Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa are two more writers of color who come in for special neglect. The Heath includes the whole of Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” and a sizable excerpt of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, including a section in which she discusses the subordination of homosexuals and explores their commonalities with mestizo peoples. Writing about Anzaldúa, critic Sonia Saldívar-Hull remarks that “Chicana feminism and lesbian politics emerged as forces that gave voice to her political agenda” and that she “wrote eloquently of the indignities a Chicana lesbian feminist overcomes as she escapes the strictures of patriarchal Chicano traditions and confronts the injustices of dominant culture.” So far, so good—but that’s it. Saldívar-Hull goes on to explain lovingly the impact of Anzaldúa’s ethnicity and gender upon her work, while failing to expound upon her sexual orientation. Audre Lorde’s lesbianism gets even less editorial attention from Claudia Tate, who offers nothing but a note that Lorde is a “black, lesbian, feminist, warrior poet.” Lorde, whose understanding of lesbianism is quite specific and connected in interesting ways with race, needs explication in this area. But she doesn’t get it here.
ON BALANCE, the Heath presents quite an impressive array of homophobic practices: the closeting of several GLBT authors; the racist construction of queerness as a white phenomenon; the refusal to grant gay or queer identities, communities, and æsthetics the respect and attention afforded to other identities; and the failure to consider sexuality a necessary valence of literary consideration. Let us be generous and consider this gallery of injuries to be unintentional, a failure of editorial vision. I don’t envy the fourteen editors who were given the task of coping with copyright and cost as they winnowed all of U.S. literature from World War II to the present down to a diverse but representative 152 authors, introduced and annotated by a gaggle of scholars. The Heath does not make public how closely these scholars were controlled by the editors, so it’s impossible to say who bears more responsibility for the Heath’s deeply impacted homophobia, or whether it stems from an explicit policy or from mere ignorance or neglect.
It is not reassuring to consider how gay and lesbian themes are couched in the Heath’s general introduction, which seems to bend over backwards to offer readers a comfortable space within which to be homophobic: “Some readers claim that too much recent writing deals with odysseys of sexual freedom.” As if the reader hadn’t gotten the message that it’s acceptable to find queer writing distasteful, the introduction later remarks that some contemporary literature is “challenging readers with issues like AIDS and ambiguous sexual definition, which are painful and, to some, unwelcome.” Is it even conceivable that the editors would say something comparable about matters of race or ethnicity?
More disturbing still is the realization that the failings of the Heath Anthology are emblematic of a much larger failure in the academy as a whole to respect the place of GLBT people and themes in modern literature (and literature in general, no doubt). The Heath is not an unfortunate outlier, but typical of how the “multicultural” still doesn’t encompass GLBT literature, history, and art.
References
Baym, Nina, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. E: Literature since 1945. 7th edition. W. W. Norton & Co., 2007.
Lauter, Paul, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. E, Contemporary Period: 1945 to the Present, 6th edition. Wadsworth Publishing, 2010.
Jeff Solomon is a visiting professor of English at the University of Puget Sound.
