Certainty
by Victor Bevine
Lake Union Publishing
339 pages, $10.99
AMONG THE FIRST gay scandals to reach widespread public consciousness in the U.S. was the Navy’s investigation into homosexual activity at its Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island. Taking place in the immediate aftermath of World War I—thus following on the heels of both the massive wartime build-up of army and naval forces and the brief but devastating flu epidemic of 1918, which hit the armed services especially hard—the investigation shed a glaring light on “immoral” sexual activities either at the training station or within the town of Newport. The town was, of course, long the summer residence of America’s well-heeled “Four Hundred.” Upper-crust society would not have been happy to learn that their summer playground was also the haunt of “fairies” plying their trade on the Cliff Walk.
Turning such dated material into a work of contemporary fiction might not seem especially propitious, but Victor Bevine, an actor and screenwriter, has done something wholly remarkable: made a piece of gay American history entertaining without sacrificing the essential gravity of the events. He credits an essay by historian George Chauncey for the initial inspiration. In a savvy stroke he decided to concentrate on the person whose arrest for homosexual solicitation provided the impetus for local newspapers, and then national ones, to take notice. That figure was the Reverend Samuel Kent, a highly respected clergyman who had ministered tirelessly to young men at the Newport Armed Services YMCA and then, in the direst hours of the influenza epidemic, comforted the sick and dying. Bevine tells much of the story from the vantage of Kent’s lawyer, William Bartlett, the heir of a Newport legal nabob who, himself a husband and father of the highest ethics, saw in Kent a heroic man of extraordinary rectitude and honor being brought low by the testimony of unworthy enlisted men. These uniformed accusers had been drafted into entrapping other sailors and Newport locals, operating as a series of “moles” and “decoys” to penetrate the well-developed homosexual party scene that, especially during wartime and its aftermath, flourished around the town. It was then that the armed services population swelled beyond the training station, with many men living off base in local boarding houses. Bevine enters the world of the “decoys” and their superiors, whose self-appointed task was to weed out perverts in their midst. Among his most fascinating characters is Charlie Mc-Kinney, a tough young Irishman who grew up in the streets and prides himself on being in the know before anyone else. McKinney, better than the other decoys, realizes just why he’s been impressed into this cohort of moles and double-crossers. Like the others, only more so, he’s a handsome rake whose sturdy build and good looks will lure the local and uniformed fairies like bees to honey. He is the one figure self-aware enough to engage real life ethical questions that challenge his sense of honor while being forced to do the dirty work. Meanwhile, his superiors insinuate him and other enlisted men into a sting operation with the zeal of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI sniffing out Communists. In this protocol of entrapment, appearances and stereotyping count for everything, and the means justify the ends. Ervin Arnold, a tough, relentless chief petty officer who had been a private investigator before joining the navy, is a paragon of the self-assured, homophobic moralist mounting a crusade: “I can tell a fairy just by the way he walks,” he boasts. In the process, the investigation gives full rein to its decoys to engage in sex, just so long as they are not the “inserted” partner. Nearly anything becomes permissible in the quest to round up as many miscreants as possible, who would then be imprisoned for months without being charged of a crime. But the investigators’ great mistake is catching the reputable Reverend Kent in their web. He has friends in high places, most especially within the ranks of the Episcopal Church, which has its own New England power base. Bevine as an actor and screenwriter has obviously learned important lessons that serve him well as a novelist. He knows how to write a scene for maximum dramatic effect; his dialogue deepens character portrayals and swiftly advances the plot; and his courtroom scenes are worthy of Scott Turow. William Bartlett, his main protagonist, stands in for the reader in that his sympathy for and admiration of the Reverend Kent determines our own understanding of the man. Kent, first held in the local jail while awaiting trial, seems saintly in forgiving his tormentors—indeed, he barely understands what has possessed them to target him—and he is patient beyond a normal man’s abilities. Yet Kent’s maternal ministering, which we see in flashbacks to the flu epidemic, also allows us to imagine how the Reverend could be perceived as unusually feminine in his behavior—which leads us to question our own gender stereotyping. Bevine shrewdly plays with these ambiguities in his portrait of the Reverend Kent; might he in fact be guilty of soliciting some of his uniformed charges? If there is any weakness to Certainty, it might be that its national dimensions are only sketched in. True, there’s a strong scene with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, interrogating the very investigators that he had allowed to run roughshod. We learn that the story was picked up nationally, but it might have been interesting to learn how newspapers like The New York Times deployed the language of innuendo and obfuscation of the day to name the unnamable. Indeed, women were not allowed in the courtroom at all for fear of offending their sensibilities—perhaps a wise decision given that such terms as “cocksucking” and “browning” were scarcely everyday fare for the swooning ladies of the day. For all that, Certainty is a brisk and compelling read, a history lesson without pain. It is literate without being fussily literary and gives us a Newport, Rhode Island, that Edith Wharton would not have recognized. Allen Ellenzweig is a frequent contributor to these pages.
