Mythomania Book

A Book Review of Robert J. Corber’s
“Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity”
By: Rick Coulter


In Homosexuality in Cold War America, Robert Corber explores aspects of gay male identity presented in film noir, as well as the writings of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Bladwin. His analysis includes the reification of stereotypes by some Hollywood films, as well as the challenges to stereotypical forms of gay male identity in various literary works. These artistic works are further examined through the social, political and economic lenses of early cold war America.
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When macro-economic structures change, and social institutions assimilate to the will of the emerging economic identity, how are individual identities altered and reified to ensure that they do not challenge or disrupt the forthcoming system? More specifically, when the base of the American economy shifts to corporate hegemony, it becomes critical for its success that the identity of the “rugged individual” or the aggressive, competitive, masculine identity be dissolved. Corber begins with this overview of postwar America and its shift in identity. He notes that this time period in America was largely defined by the consumption of mass produced goods, movement to the suburbs, and mass education, all of which helped create a larger professional and managerial class.
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Corber outlines the work of C. Wright Mills and others to introduce the concept of the “organizational man” which he continues to use throughout the book. The “organizational man” defined men who “were discouraged from competing aggressively with one another and were expected to submit to corporate structures in exchange for obtaining a secure place in the organizational hierarchy” (6). The male who refused to be domesticated by settling down and raising a family became the object of suspicion. The Kinsey report, among other variables, reinforced Cold War fears that homosexuals were visibly indistinguishable from heterosexuals and therefore their covert presence, similar to “communists in our midst,” made them a security threat. Corber notes that one of the ways that “the national-security state discouraged forms of male homosocial bonding that conflicted with the Fordist organization of production and consumption was by homosexualizing them”(11).
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Throughout the book Corber explores the intersection of masculinity and sexual identity, and the various forms of resistance to the reorganization of masculinity that emerge in film noir and in the writings of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin. The first half of the book is dedicated to an overview of film noir followed by more detailed readings or examinations of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947).
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Corber notes that many of the directors and screenwriters of the visual style of filmmaking known as film noir had been members of the communist party in the 1930’s and were later blacklisted following the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He notes that film noir offered a unique and subversive visual style that allowed the filmmakers to address controversial themes of postwar America. Many of these films are characterized by a “hard-boiled” detective who represents individuality and are a contrast to the “organization man” and the socializing bureaucratic structures that had come to define American society. Corber notes that “film noir expressed a desire to recover the form of male identity displaced by the rise of commodity culture” (53). He then directs our attention to the often overlooked presence of gay male characters within film noir. Usually these characters were marked by visuals that contrasted them to the hard-boiled detective, perhaps to solidify the detective’s own heterosexuality in the absence of a domestic life. As opposed to the disheveled and unshaven detective, these characters were usually well dressed, had upper-crust accents, impeccable taste, antique-filled apartments, and effeminate mannerisms, etc. (10). Although the portrayal of these characters has been criticized for reifying stereotypes, Corber argues that they also “encouraged a mode of spectatorship that indirectly affirmed gay male identity” (67).
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In his analysis of Laura, Corber notes that Lydecker, the effeminate male character, in the role usually reserved for the femme fatale, is visually associated with the commodity form. Lydecker’s well furnished apartment, which the original script described as “too exquisite for a man,” “serves as evidence of the feminine position he occupies in relation to commodity culture” (67). Corber goes on to explore the relationship between Fordism and homophobia and dissects the film further showing that, although the visual economy of the film legitimated gay male forms of identity, it also ensured that the male spectator’s gaze remained fixed on the commodities that underlay the emergence of Fordism.[1]
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In the second half of the first section of the book, Corber compares the two films mentioned above to the novels on which they were based. He notes how in the translation to film, characters were changed and messages were compromised. For instance, the film version of Laura suppressed much of the feminist content of the novel. He also notes that the film Crossfire (1947) based on Richard Brook’s novel The Brick Foxhole (1945) changed its theme from homophobia to anti-Semitism, and although it was a courageous film that challenged anti-Semitism and defended Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was ultimately a less progressive film than Laura. And, although Laura’s progressive statement was not much more than a presentation of gay male camp that reinforced stereotypes, Corber argues that, in a time when gay men threatened to become invisible, camp provided gay men with a survival strategy and access to the public sphere.
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In the second half of the book, Corber begins by exploring the politics of the closet in Tennessee Williams’ writing. He explores William’s short story Hard Candy (1954), and his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954). Corber notes critics’ scrutiny that Williams had openly gay characters in his short stories but not in his plays, with many critics claiming that Broadway was Williams’ closet. Corber defends Williams’ position in the context of the political climate at the time and concludes his analysis, noting that in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the closet emerges as a space in which not only gay men but also communists and other groups targeted by the national-security apparatus can find political refuge while continuing to engage in their subversive activities” (117).
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Corber’s analysis of Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar is mostly a response to earlier critics and theorists who had claimed that the novel reinforced the stereotype of the suicidal gay man, or that the novel was an example of the endurance of the masculinist tradition of American letters (137). Corber believes that Vidal was misunderstood in his attempts to dissolve fixed sexual categories. Vidal himself, in describing his reasons for writing the novel stated:
" I was bored with playing it safe. I wanted to take risks, to try something no American had done before. I decided to examine the homosexual underworld (which I knew rather less well than I pretended), and in the process show the ‘naturalness’ of homosexual relations, as well as making the point that there is no such thing as a homosexual."
Corber notes that Vidal “hoped that by observing the gay male subculture through the eyes of an “ordinary” middle-class boy, he could dismantle the binary logic of sexual difference, a logic that made homosexuality seem ‘unnatural’” (136). Corber spends some time in this section exploring the emergence of the distinctly gay macho style and tying it to Vidal’s masculinization of gay male subjectivity.
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In the final section, James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) is explored. Corber also looks at Lionel Trilling’s and Richard Chase’s take on Baldwin’s novel as well as their readings of other works, including Melville’s Billy Budd. Corber also explores the intersection of race and sexuality which were central to the issues surrounding the controversy of Baldwin’s critique of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940).
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Through the exploration of these three authors, Williams, Vidal, and Baldwin, Corber makes the argument that they, unlike film noir, “provided an alternative understanding of gay male identity that laid the foundation for the gay liberation movement” (191). These three writers were able to stress the construction of gay male subjectivity as well as critique the institutions and practices that regulated the production of gender and identity (192). Corber uses these writers to fill in the gaps of both queer theory and activism and notes that the work of these writers anticipated the movement towards a poststructuralist turn in gay and lesbian studies.
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[1] Fordism, named after Henry Ford, refers to various social theories about production and related socio-economic phenomena.[1] It has varying but related meanings in different fields, as well as for Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. -Wikipedia