Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
by Joseph Lelyveld
Knopf. 448 pages, $28.95
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
by Manning Marable
Viking. 608 pages, $30.
TWO MAJOR BIOGRAPHIES about larger-than-life 20th-century political figures were published this year, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, by Joseph Lelyveld, and Malcolm X, by Manning Marable. The subjects of the books share a common destiny, although not contemporaneously, as victims of assassination, and both became global legends dedicated to the struggle for human rights on different continents—Gandhi for Indian independence from British colonial rule, and Malcolm X for ending white supremacy in the United States. These books chronicle the complex metamorphosis of both political leaders from humble beginnings characterized by victimization and oppression into audacious players at the forefront of revolutions that affected the future of millions. Pulitzer Prize-winning Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times, and Marable (who died a few days before his ten-years-in-the-making book was published), a leading scholar of black history and professor at Columbia University, bring into question same-sex-related experience, behavior, and desire by the subjects of their biographies.
Gandhi and Malcolm X were consciously aware of their legacies and the historicizing function of narrative, and as much as possible they exerted control over any accounts of their lives, believing their biographies to be the embodiment of politics, social history, and human destiny. The national symbolism is embodied in their physical presence: Gandhi rejected the Western-style suit in favor of the hand-woven khadi costume of an Indian peasant; and Malcolm X abandoned conked hair and the zoot suit for the Nation of Islam’s basic blue-serge suit. Each was captured iconically by a well-known female photographer: Gandhi by Margaret Bourke-White for Life magazine (Figure 1); Malcolm X by Eve Arnold for Magnum Photos (Figure 2). Both wrote classic autobiographies—Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927-28) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley, 1965)—and each seized the historical moment through a transformative life history. Malcolm X’s autobiography falls within the literary genre of prison narrative; he joins a familiar tradition—exemplified by Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, in which he wrote that “prison life with its endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious,” as well as Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail—which recognizes the symbolic role of imprisonment as the cauldron for rebellion against the absolute power of the state. Malcolm X was imprisoned from 1946 to 1952 and Gandhi intermittently, serving two years of a six-year sentence for sedition from 1922 to 1924.
Another biographical detail that Gandhi and Malcolm X appear to have shared—as brought to light by the two recent biographies—is a history of same-sex sexual experience or desire at a stage in their lives. The publication of both books generated a maelstrom of criticism and controversy. Great Soul was banned in the Indian state of Gujarat, and some Indian leaders called for a boycott of the book in India and the U.S. Malcolm X, a 2011 National Book Award finalist, provoked denial and indignation in the African-American community. Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz ended an interview with Michel Martin on NPR by attacking these assertions: “He is very clear in his activities, which nothing included being gay. … So if he had a gay encounter, he likely would’ve talked about it.” Tulane professor Melissa Harris-Perry suggested that questions about Malcolm X’s sexual experiences “can be read as salacious or titillating.” Neither biography is meant as an exposé, and the information they provide is not new. Gandhi’s intense relationship with Hermann Kallenbach, with whom he lived while in South Africa, is preserved in letters written by Gandhi and documented in several books. However, as Lelyveld notes, Gandhi early on made a point of destroying what he called Kallenbach’s “logical and charming love notes” to him, in the belief that he was honoring his friend’s wish that they be seen by no other eyes. But the architect saved all of Gandhi’s, and his descendants, decades after his death and Gandhi’s, put them up for auction. Only then were the letters acquired by the National Archives of India and, finally, published. Kallenbach is also a character in Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award-winning film Gandhi (1982). Malcolm X’s relationship with William Paul Lennon is mentioned in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Bruce Perry’s Malcolm: The Life of the Man Who Changed Black America has accounts of Malcolm X’s youthful same-sex encounters, including one with a transgendered person, Willie Mae, and one with Lennon just before his incarceration. There’s a scene of Malcolm with Lennon in Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic Malcolm X. Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach, an affluent Jewish architect, met and lived together for almost four years on the thousand-acre Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg that became the prototypical Gandhian ashram. Kallenbach donated the land and provided for Tolstoy Farm financially. At times he was a bodyguard, armed with a gun, a fact unknown to the nonviolent Gandhi. In Attenborough’s film, Gandhi validates Kallenbach’s economic importance to Tolstoy Farm when he introduces a character who’s standing on a rooftop, shirtless, a Star of David dangling from his neck: “Ah. Hermann Kallenbach. He’s the chief carpenter. Also, our chief benefactor.” Lelyveld claims that Kallenbach was not an elusive phantom; rather, he characterizes Gandhi’s relationship with him as “the most intimate, also ambiguous, relationship of his lifetime.” The attachment did not go unnoticed: there were rumors within the Indian community, and “it was no secret then, or later, that Gandhi, leaving his wife behind, had gone to live with a man.” Gandhi recognized Kallenbach’s centrality when, on a solo trip to England, he wrote, “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom.” The homoerotic potential generated by the portrait didn’t elude Gandhi. He acknowledges his desire, writing to Kallenbach that the placement of the image “is to show to you and me how completely you have taken possession of my body.” The palpably dramatic letter concludes: “This is slavery with a vengeance.” When there’s a concern from Kallenbach about a divided affection, Gandhi writes reassuringly, “Though I love and almost adore Andrews so, I would not exchange you for him. You still remain the dearest and nearest to me.” Three months before he leaves South Africa for India, he writes affectionately, “You will always be you and you alone to me. I have told you you will have to desert me and not I you.” In 1917, Kallenbach decided to sail with Gandhi, accompanying him to India, but he was unable to get a passport as a German national traveling during World War I. He was detained in an enemy camp on the Isle of Man and was returned to East Prussia. Gandhi lamented “I have no Kallenbach” during the fifth year of separation while in India, and wrote: “You are always before my mind’s eye.” The two men weren’t reunited until 1937. It is evident that the relationship between Gandhi and Kallenbach was desexualized. Both men adhered to the practice of Brahmacharya that includes a self-imposed celibacy necessary on the path to holiness. Gandhi even avoided those foods or spices that might pleasurably cultivate taste buds or intensify the senses, and he avoided dairy products that he believed were aphrodisiacs. There can be little doubt, however, that the attachment between the two men was significant, life-altering, and erotic. Malcolm X and William Paul Lennon On the other hand, there is scant evidence that Malcolm X had any meaningful attachments with or desire for men, but there are several narratives that detail same-sex activity, specifically a relationship with someone named William Paul Lennon. Lennon, a former manager of the Dorset Hotel in New York City, relocated to Boston, where he began to employ “male secretaries” in his home. Marable’s use of the term “secretary” seems to be a euphemism for these male-for-hire arrangements. Marable speculates that Malcolm X’s initial contact with Lennon may have come through classified advertisements. In 1944, Malcolm Little (his family name before changing it to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz when he converted to orthodox Islam) began working for Lennon as a “butler and occasional house worker.” In Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, Lennon appears in a scene, set up by a character named Rudy. In the film, Rudy refers to Lennon as “this rich old fag motherfucker.” Rudy then describes a curious ritual with Lennon: “I give him a bath every Friday night. Towel him off. Talcum powder on him. Put him to bed. Just like a baby. He gets his jollies off.” In the film, Malcolm, Rudy, and Shorty, another cohort, rob Lennon, audaciously entering his bedroom while the elderly man is asleep with a young blond man in his arms. Malcolm adroitly slips off Lennon’s diamond pinky ring without waking him. In the 1964 Autobiography, Malcolm refers to Lennon as an “old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat” but avoids the homophobic epithet. The Autobiography details the same scene of paraphilic infantilism. Marable is convinced Malcolm X was describing his own sexual encounters with Paul Lennon, but concedes that any such experiences were probably limited. Nevertheless the relationship was sufficiently intense—and public—as to generate speculation and raised eyebrows during the activist’s life and after his demise. Malcolm’s sister Ella, with whom he was very close, was incensed about her brother’s enduring relationship with Lennon. When Malcolm was imprisoned, he wanted Ella to serve as a liaison, hoping Lennon would act on his behalf with the prison probation board, convinced that he would use his financial resources and other contacts to help him during his imprisonment. During Malcolm’s six-year incarceration, he only had 34 visits. It is not known whether Lennon was one of the friends whose names were redacted in the records of the Concord, Massachusetts, prison. Marable proposes that “the physical intimacies between the two men created a bond.” Malcolm hoped that Lennon could give him a home and a job after his release from prison, but Lennon decisively put his previous life behind him after Malcolm’s release. Neither Malcolm X nor Mahatma Gandhi ever addressed the issue of sexual identity as such. Gandhi died in 1948, Malcolm X in 1965, each before the women’s and gay rights movements had taken off. However, in a 1929 letter published in Young India, Gandhi commented on an investigation conducted by the education department in the eastern Indian state of Bihar of allegations of pedophilia by teachers toward their (male) students. He wrote about the “existence of the vice among teachers who were abusing their position among their boys in order to satisfy their unnatural lust,” concluding: “Unnatural though the vice is, it has come down to us from times immemorial.” Unfortunately, in Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), Ruth Vanita mischaracterized Gandhi’s phrase “unnatural lust” as referring to homosexuality, equating it with pedophilia. Since the publication of the two biographies, there has been a rush in some quarters to defame Gandhi and Malcolm X. (“Malcolm X is Bisexual” or “Gandhi a Sexual Weirdo”). There was even racist parody. (See Paul Rudnick, “I Was Gandhi’s Boyfriend,” in the New Yorker that asks, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do a campaign with a poster of your parents hugging you, and the poster could say, ‘Staying in the Closet Is a Hin-Don’t’?”) And there’s been denial. Lelyveld attempted an acrobatic back-pedaling on PBS’s Charlie Rose because his book has been controversial; he claimed, “I played with some details to show how that caricature could be created. Perhaps the lesson in this is don’t be so playful in your writing. … This is a very important and intimate relationship for Gandhi, but not sexual.” When considering the enormity of the constraints imposed on sexual identities by patriarchal systems, especially in the context of colonial domination and racial apartheid, it is to be expected that activists with a liberationist agenda unrelated to their sexual orientation will keep the latter under lock and key. In communities of color here and in developing counties, it is certainly the case that colonialism prevented the full expression of a same-sex identity. For example, it was only in 2009 that India’s High Court finally overturned Section 377, an 1861 law that made homosexuality a crime, an atavistic holdover from colonial times. Michael Eric Dyson, academic and author, wrote in an essay, “The Bible, Sexual Ethics, and the Theology of Homoeroticism,” that the black church is inhibited from rejecting homophobia because the white church long ago foisted a schism of body and soul “to justify its psychic, moral, and material investments in chattel slavery and racial hegemony.” He also wrote in The New York Times that a discussion of Malcolm X’s same-sex experiences “could serve as a powerful interpretive tool, a way of exploring and explaining the cultural weight of oppressive black machismo and the cruel varieties of homophobia that afflict black communities.” The distinctiveness of same-sex identity is defined by community, politics, selfhood, culture, history, genealogy, æsthetics, language, and imagination. There is no consensus about identity, and the biographies of Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X demonstrate the pitfalls of reductionist categorizations of selfhood. Steven F. Dansky has been an activist, photographer, and writer for more than fifty years. He was a founder of the effeminist movement and a member of New York’s Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
