Homosexuals in Life and the Arts

...Because homosexual relationships tend to be more transient, physique and youthfulness become all-important to pederasts as a drawing power, accounting for their well-maintained bodies But what accounts for the faces, which seem to age differently from those of heterosexuals, and remain more boyish even as they become more wizened...

...These faces stand out immediately in any theatrical lobby during intermission, though their owners may be dressed conventionally and have female companions They are as easily recognizable as certain ethnic traits, but since homosexuals are not an ethnic group, it would appear that the common denominator is certain biological factors In other words, the difference between homosexuality and hetero-sexuality may be much deeper and greater than just a question of (as some people are indelicately wont to put it) what you stick your thing into But if the difference is not physiological or psychopathological, might it not be something equally profound, even if it has no readily available label...

...antihuman And, above all, useless Not that I want art to be utilitarian, but I do want it to comment on the world with something more than a snicker The third option tor the homosexual playwright or filmmaker seems to be the Albertine strategy, as the late Stanley Edgar Hyman dubbed it, on the model of Proust's alleged metamorphosing of his chauffeur-lover Albert into his heroine Albertine for the sake of propriety and punishability Noticing a falseness resulting from this strategy, Stanley Kauffmann, then drama critic ot the New York Times, wrote a Sunday piece urging the leading homosexual dramatists to come out of the closet and write overtly homosexual plays—which contributed to his losing his job and didn't change anything m the theater But it is perfectly true Only in the fringe theater do frankly homosexual plays show up with any regularity, on Broadway, for instance, they are virtually nonexistent, for it is assumed (probably rightly) that, unless camped up or otherwise sensationalized, they will not wash with the great unwashed All this is a tremendous waste, because so many talented people in the arts are homosexual The reasons are easy to come by and have often been stated Chief among them are the defensive or compensatory introversion of the homosexual in a world of extroverted "straights," an introversion that leads to cultural pursuits, and the greater hospitality of the bohemian artistic milieu to sexual nonconformism But no matter how accepted the homosexual artist may be among his heterosexual colleagues, his work, undisguised, may not pass muster with general audiences for the reasons I suggested earlier Such audiences would not see the relevance of, let us say, a homosexual love triangle to a heterosexual one, only the shocking sight of men m bed together Thus in the movies homosexuality remains a relative taboo, too, except in the underground or pornographic cinema Just about the only conspicuous English-language films of recent years that dealt extensively with homosexuality were Sunday, Bloody Sunday, The Killing of Sister George, and two quite unsuccessful filmizations of plays by Joe Orton In Sunday, there was a considerable admixture of hetero-sexuality, as it were to soften the blow, m the other three, inversion was treated farcically enough to make it look comparatively unreal The problem is how to bring the homosexual playwright and moviemaker into the mainstream of theater and film without forcing any desperate and distorting stratagems on the artist, and without turning the heterosexual audience off and away The obvious answer would be to induce homosexual artists to minimize the sexuality of their works, but that would be doubly damaging first, because artists cannot be subjected to coercion of any kind, and, secondly, because such heterosexual pressure on homosexual artists would intensify their bitterness toward the heterosexual world Nor do I see much hope in any attempt to create separate but equal theaters and cinemas, heterosexual and homosexual Even if this system—which, in a random way, is already m operation—fully established itself, it would prove sterile There is no real development possible for an art form subdivided into enclaves or ghettos, an isolated small stream sooner or later turns into a brackish backwater I don't know how this problem can be resolved, but I can affirm that homosexual artists have made one sizable contribution to film, fiction and theater wit America is strong on humor and weak on wit, what it has of the latter was supplied mostly by displaced persons?Jewish or foreign-born artists, and homosexual ones The most mordant forms of wit, in fact, appear preponderantly in the works of homosexuals, and wit is an element no culture can afford to dispense with...

...I think that we all feel a special sort of xenophobia when differences between us and someone else assume a particularly intimate character Thus we are not much affected by someone's talking or dressing differently from us, but where eating or toilet manners depart substantially from ours, we do become disturbed If I am correct in assuming that sex is what most of us—still?consider most private and indeed (dare I say it...

...sacred, it becomes very hard for us to accept a sexuality that is totally opposed to ours I find the standard theory that people who get upset at homosexuality are really distressed by latent elements ot it in themselves, and taking it out on the homosexual, inadequate It may hold m some cases, but it is at least equally possible that the opposite is true that what causes in heterosexuals anything from mild discomfiture to acute loathing is the alienness of it all, as it the host and hostess at a formal dinner party proceeded to copulate on the dining-room table It is the combination of an act's being at once so intimate and so outlandish, so close to the viewer yet so—as he sees it—distorted, that causes discomfort, anger, disgust You may ascribe this to lack of tolerance, or lack of habituation, but I suspect it goes deeper And, of course, it is aimed not merely at homosexuality, but also at other deviant practices, it is only that homosexuality gets it worse because it is not just different from, but actually the diametrical opposite of heterosexual behavior Thus to see homosexuality in action, even on the stage or screen, is for most people like seeing their most cherished beliefs being trampled underfoot It is no use arguing that what Tom and Dick do to each other is no act of aggression toward Harry If they do it within Harry's sight and hearing, it becomes just that, for reasons every bit as deep-seated as why one's own stool smells less offensive to one than other people's There follows the obvious corollary that heterosexual displays must be equally distasteful to the homosexual, and that his having to bottle up and disguise his distaste may make it even keener and more difficult to bear This could explain the defiance and rage many homosexuals harbor toward the heterosexual world and its official culture, a rage which, whether turned outward or inward, must be corroding and destructive It is surely one of the reasons why homosexual plays and movies tend to present the homosexual act surrounded by so much violence and degradation Or, alternatively, cruel mockery The most recent New York plays that dealt with homosexuality were Bad Habits, where it was made wicked tun ot...

...Find Your Wax Home, where it was given rather lurid trimmings, and Naomi Couit, where a homosexual picks up a "trick" who proceeds to brutalize and rob him, and the situation becomes as mean and ugly as it has been in homosexual drama ever since the first overt specimen hit Broadway Terrence McNally's And Thing', That Go Bump m the Night The trouble, however, is less with homosexual art that is excessively violent than with homosexual art that tries to avoid such violence by channeling it into molds acceptable to a general audience—the usual solution being camp Camp is, basically, a supposedly harmless land of violence excess of triviality, irrelevance, vulgarity, persiflage?sticking one's tongue out at the world It is defusing maladjustment and anger into caricature, irreverence, outrageousness It differs from satire in that it is unfocused, unstructured, often seemingly or actually self-ridiculing It involves a continuous overdose of mock seriousness, extravagant flamboyance, or glaring travesty, well beyond the degree the subject can bear Camp is a domesticated rage, a gasp turned into a giggle This, too, can be quite horrible In its poeticized form, it is Genet perceiving brutish condemned murderers as luminous angels of love, in its grosser shapes, it is Robert Wilson, pop art, the Theater of the Ridiculous, a large part of underground cinema, the film criticism of people like the late Parker Tyler, the music of John Cage, much of the dance of Merce Cunningham, and such It is by no means the sole property of homosexuals, nor is it without glimmers ot talent, sometimes more than glimmers But it is all, finally, obfuscatory, emperor's-new-clothesish...

...Yes, society may have much to do with exacerbating the sickness, but is not, I believe, its cause As for past societies practicing and condoning homosexuality, I cannot say much about dispensations I have not lived under, though I wonder whether such practices did not take their toll on wives and the status of women What I am concerned with is the society in which we live, and m whose context I perceive homosexuality as humanly diminishing That, in effect, is my definition of sickness something that lessens the capacity for using all of one's human resources Most obvious, for the homosexual, would be the loss of children, yet that strikes me as comparatively unimportant I do not consider parenthood an essential human condition, besides, it is becoming increasingly possible for homosexuals to adopt children or be foster parents, on the plausible assumption that just as enlightened parents would not force their religious preferences on their children, so they would refrain from foisting their sexual ones upon them The basic loss is more important Homosexuals miss out on heterosexual relations—they are prevented by their sickness from having mature and full relationships with the opposite sex Now I firmly believe that there is nothing in the world so stimulating, broadening, soul-satisfying, and life-enhancing—in short, educational, in the broadest and deepest sense of that word—as the serious nexus between a man and a woman There is nothing metaphysical or superstitious or merely conventional about this belief, as I see it, nor is it some simplistic theory about the appropriateness of opposites' attracting each other, although that comes nearer the mark My point is that all learning is a kind of love, and all love a kind of learning, and that the greatest of these, the one that subsumes all others, is the intimate intermingling of man and woman This need not be the one and everlasting love, however nice that might be, but it must be between the two sexes Homosexuality, male or female, strikes me as a form of narcissism or infantilism, assuming that there is a difference between those aberrations Love—and this is the hardest and most important part of it—is being transported beyond the limits of the self, to be taken only as far as one's replica is a trip hardly worth the effort It is going no farther than from one's incomplete self to its reflection in the mirror, the shortest distance between two pointlessnesses Life must be understood and experienced as a whole, and whole means men and women together I won't patronize women by making them into something inferior or superior to men What they are is different, in many though not all ways, and that difference is the most precious thing mankind possesses?more needed than a bicameral legislature It is as important as two eyes for depth perception, as seeing the (at least) two sides of a question There is not always a typical male and a typical female point of view on any given matter, but the ways in which the two sexes arrive at the same point are often not the same, and getting there is half the fun Of course, it may be objected that homosexuals can have women friends, and most of them do But it is in their sexuality that the difference between men and women is fundamental and crucial, and it is in this area that the bridging of the gap becomes most challenging, absorbing and rewarding Moreover, the many aspects of living that, though not directly sexual, are nonetheless sexually charged, must also be taken into account No matter how accepted a lifestyle homosexuality is or will be, the enriching variety of intersexual collaboration must, by definition, be denied it Let me assume, for the sake of argument, that things might somehow change, the fact remains that in the present preponderantly heterosexual society homosexuality is a sickness, or, if you prefer, a deficiency Yet calling it a sickness seems kinder, for a deficiency might be partly one's own fault, like needlessly dropping out of school, whereas a sickness represents only in the rarest of cases one's choice or fault We should not overlook the possibility of a physiological basis for homosexuality—why else would one so often recognize homosexuals, especially older ones, at a glance...

...Culture Watching HOMOSEXUALS IN LIFE AND THE ARTS BY JOHN SIMON The American Psychiatric Association recently voted that homosexuality is not a sickness Soon thereafter, a good many psychiatrists complained that they had been hoodwinked that the letters from prominent people asking them to vote homosexuality into normality proved to be put-up jobs, written under pressure from Gay Liberation So bleeding-heart liberalism responded to psychic lobbying, and psychiatrists yielded to pressuring by distinguished correspondents only to reverse themselves (some of them, anyway) upon learning that the letters were not spontaneous As if spontaneity were what mattered rather than truth' In any event, what was long considered an illness has been given a clean bill of health by the very people who until yesterday treated it as a sickness, and henceforth only the homosexual who does not feel adjusted is to be treated as a deviate Clinically, this makes sense, certainly no one who considers himself adjusted and is functioning should be tampered with—it is hard enough nowadays to function under any circumstances Nevertheless, sickness cannot be voted into health, and determining what is sickness and what health is too important a matter to be left entirely in the hands of psychiatrists I would propose the following five points (1) Homosexuality is a sickness, but as such deserving compassion rather than persecution (2) It is a sickness one can live with relatively happily, like hay fever or a trick knee (3) It is a sickness that may, in certain cases, be less grave than the neuroses of many so-called healthy heterosexuals (4) It should under no circumstances be legally or socially discriminated against (5) It should be recognized as a phenomenon with far-ranging cultural implications For my present purposes, points 1 and 5 are of special interest, my position on 1 leading into my attitudes on 5 Since certain cultures have found homosexuality quite acceptable, you may say, if it is a sickness, isn't it one arbitrarily decided upon by the intolerance of society...