The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
Page 41
In a letter to a friend, George Orwell wrote, “It is impossible to mention Jews in print, either favorably or unfavorably, without getting into trouble.” But there are times when trouble had better be got into before mere trouble turns into catastrophe. Jews, blacks, and homosexualists are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. Since our own Christian majority looks to be getting ready for great adventures at home and abroad, I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed. This seems an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situation and that of the same-sexers. At one level, the Jews are perfectly correct. A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact. Although sexual preference is an even more powerful fact, it is not one that creates any particular social or cultural or religious bond between those so-minded. Although Jews would doubtless be Jews if there was no anti-Semitism, same-sexers would think little or nothing at all about their preference if society ignored it. So there is a difference between the two estates. But there is no difference in the degree of hatred felt by the Christian majority for Christ-killers and Sodomites. In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. “After all,” said Isherwood, “Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.” The young man was not impressed. “But Hitler killed six million Jews,” he said sternly. “What are you?” asked Isherwood. “In real estate?”
Like it or not, Jews and homosexualists are in the same fragile boat, and one would have to be pretty obtuse not to see the common danger. But obtuseness is the name of the game among New York’s new class. Elsewhere, I have described the shrill fag-baiting of Joseph Epstein, Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Kazin, and the Hilton Kramer Hotel. Harper’s magazine and Commentary usually publish these pieces, though other periodicals are not above printing the odd exposé of the latest homosexual conspiracy to turn the United States over to the Soviet Union or to structuralism or to Christian Dior. Although the new class’s thoughts are never much in themselves, and they themselves are no more than spear carriers in the political and cultural life of the West, their prejudices and superstitions do register in a subliminal way, making mephitic the air of Manhattan if not of the Republic.
A case in point is that of Mrs. Norman Podhoretz, also known as Midge Decter (like Martha Ivers, whisper her name). In September of last year, Decter published a piece called “The Boys on the Beach” in her husband’s magazine, Commentary. It is well worth examining in some detail because she has managed not only to come up with every known prejudice and superstition about same-sexers but also to make up some brand-new ones. For sheer vim and vigor, “The Boys on the Beach” outdoes its implicit model, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Decter notes that when the “homosexual rights movement first burst upon the scene,” she was “more than a little astonished.” Like so many new-class persons, she writes a stilted sort of genteel-gentile prose not unlike—but not very like, either—The New Yorker house style of the 1940s and ’50s. She also writes with the authority and easy confidence of someone who knows that she is very well known indeed to those few who know her.
Decter tells us that twenty years ago, she got to know a lot of pansies at a resort called Fire Island Pines, where she and a number of other new-class persons used to make it during the summers. She estimates that 40 percent of the summer people were heterosexual; the rest were not. Yet the “denizens, homosexual and heterosexual alike, were predominantly professionals and people in soft marginal business—lawyers, advertising executives, psychotherapists, actors, editors, writers, publishers, etc.” Keep this in mind. Our authoress does not.
Decter goes on to tell us that she is now amazed at the recent changes in the boys on the beach. Why have they become so politically militant—and so ill groomed? “What indeed has happened to the homosexual community I used to know—they who only a few short years ago [as opposed to those manly 370-day years] were characterized by nothing so much as a sweet, vain, pouting, girlish attention to the youth and beauty of their bodies?” Decter wrestles with this problem. She tells us how, in the old days, she did her very best to come to terms with her own normal dislike for these half-men—and half-women, too: “There were also homosexual women at the Pines, but they were, or seemed to be, far fewer in number. Nor, except for a marked tendency to hang out in the company of large and ferocious dogs, were they instantly recognizable as the men were.” Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I’d get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto.
Decter was disturbed by “the slender, seamless, elegant and utterly chic” clothes of the fairies. She also found it “a constant source of wonder” that when the fairies took off their clothes, “the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs were smooth and silky…. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual preference [previously known to right-thinking Jews as an abomination against Jehovah] and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones?” Here Decter betrays her essential modesty and lack of experience. In the no doubt privileged environment of her Midwestern youth, she could not have seen very many gentile males without their clothes on. If she had, she would have discovered that gentile men tend to be less hairy than Jews except, of course, when they are not. Because the Jews killed our Lord, they are forever marked with hair on their shoulders—something that no gentile man has on his shoulders except for John Travolta and a handful of other Italian-Americans from the Englewood, New Jersey, area.
It is startling that Decter has not yet learned that there is no hormonal difference between men who like sex with other men and those who like sex with women. She notes, “There is also such a thing as characteristic homosexual speech…it is something of an accent redolent of small towns in the Midwest whence so many homosexuals seemed to have migrated to the big city.” Here one detects the disdain of the self-made New Yorker for the rural or small-town American. “Midwest” is often a code word for the flyovers, for the millions who do not really matter. But she is right in the sense that when a group chooses to live and work together, they do tend to sound and look alike. No matter how crowded and noisy a room, one can always detect the new-class person’s nasal whine.
Every now and then, Decter does wonder if, perhaps, she is generalizing and whether this will “no doubt in itself seem to many of the uninitiated a bigoted formulation.” Well, Midge, it does. But the spirit is upon her, and she cannot stop because “one cannot even begin to get at the truth about homosexuals without this kind of generalization. They are a group so readily distinguishable.” Except of course, when they are not. It is one thing for a group of queens, in “soft, marginal” jobs, to “cavort,” as she puts it, in a summer place and be “easily distinguishable” to her cold eye just as Jewish members of the new class are equally noticeable to the cold gentile eye. But it is quite another thing for those men and women who prefer same-sex sex to other-sex sex yet do not choose to be identified—and so are not. To begin to get at the truth about homosexuals, one must realize that the majority of those millions of Americans who prefer same-sex sex to other-sex sex are obliged, sometimes willingly and happily but often not, to marry and have children and to conform to the guidelines set down by the heterosexual dictatorship.
Decter would know nothing of this because in her “soft, marginal” world, she is not meant to know. She does remark upon the fairies at the Pines who did have wives and children: “They were for the most part charming and amusing fathers, rather like favorite uncles. And their wives…drank.” This dramatic ellipsis is most Decterian.
Decter next does the ritual attack on Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams for presenting “what could only have been homosexual relationships as the deeper truth about love in our time.” This is about as true as the late Maria Callas’s conviction that you could always tell a Jew because he had a hump at the back of his neck—something Callas herself had in dromedarian spades.
Decter makes much of what she assumes to be the fags’ mockery of the heterosexual men at the Pines: “Homosexuality paints them [heterosexuals] with the color of sheer entrapment,” while the fags’ “smooth and elegant exteriors, unmussed by traffic with the detritus of modern family existence, constituted a kind of sniggering reproach to their striving and harried straight brothers.” Although I have never visited the Pines, I am pretty sure that I know the “soft marginal” types, both hetero and homo, that hung out there in the 1960s. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the self-ghettoized same-sexer is his perfect indifference to the world of the other-sexers. Although Decter’s blood was always at the boil when contemplating these unnatural and immature half-men, they were, I would suspect, serenely unaware of her and her new-class cronies, solemnly worshiping at the shrine of The Family.
To hear Decter tell it, fags had nothing to complain of then, and they have nothing to complain of now: “Just to name the professions and industries in which they had, and still have, a significant presence is to define the boundaries of a certain kind of privilege: theatre, music, letters, dance, design, architecture, the visual arts, fashion at every level—from head, as it were, to foot, and from inception to retail—advertising, journalism, interior decoration, antique dealing, publishing…the list could go on.” Yes. But these are all pretty “soft, marginal” occupations. And none is “dominated” by fags. Most male same-sexers are laborers, farmers, mechanics, small businessmen, schoolteachers, firemen, policemen, soldiers, sailors. Most female same-sexers are wives and mothers. In other words, they are like the rest of the population. But then it is hard for the new-class person to realize that Manhattan is not the world. Or as a somewhat alarmed Philip Rahv said to me after he had taken a drive across the United States, “My God! There are so many of them!” In theory, Rahv had always known that there were a couple of hundred million gentiles out there, but to see them, in the flesh, unnerved him. I told him that I was unnerved, too, particularly when they start showering in the Blood of the Lamb.
Decter does concede that homosexualists have probably not “established much of a presence in basic industry or government service or in such classic [new-classy?] professions as doctoring and lawyering but then for anyone acquainted with them as a group the thought suggests itself that few of them have ever made much effort in these directions.” Plainly, the silly billies are too busy dressing up and dancing the hully-gully to argue a case in court. Decter will be relieved to know that the percentage of same-sexers in the “classic” activities is almost as high, proportionately, as that of Jews. But a homosexualist in a key position at, let us say, the Department of Labor will be married and living under a good deal of strain because he could be fired if it is known that he likes to have sex with other men.
Decter knows that there have always been homosexual teachers, and she thinks that they should keep quiet about it. But if they keep quiet, they can be blackmailed or fired. Also, a point that would really distress her, a teacher known to be a same-sexer would be a splendid role model for those same-sexers that he—or she—is teaching. Decter would think this an unmitigated evil because men and women were created to breed; but, of course, it would be a perfect good because we have more babies than we know what to do with while we lack, notoriously, useful citizens at ease with themselves. That is what the row over the schools is all about.
Like most members of the new class, Decter accepts without question Freud’s line (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) that “we actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.” For Freud, perversion was any sexual activity involving “the abandonment of the reproductive function.” Freud also deplored masturbation as a dangerous “primal affliction.” So did Moses. But then it was Freud’s curious task to try to create a rational, quasi-scientific basis for Mosaic law. The result has been not unlike the accomplishments of Freud’s great contemporary, the ineffable and inexorable Mary Baker Eddy, whose First Church of Christ Scientist he was able to match with his First Temple of Moses Scientist.
Decter says that once faggots have “ensconced” themselves in certain professions or arts, “they themselves have engaged in a good deal of discriminatory practices against others. There are businesses and professions [which ones? She is congenitally short of data] in which it is less than easy for a straight, unless he makes the requisite gesture of propitiation to the homosexual in power, to get ahead.” This, of course, was Hitler’s original line about the Jews: they had taken over German medicine, teaching, law, journalism. Ruthlessly, they kept out gentiles; lecherously, they demanded sexual favors. “I simply want to reduce their numbers in these fields,” Hitler told Prince Philip of Hesse. “I want them proportionate to their overall number in the population.” This was the early solution; the final solution followed with equal logic.
In the 1950s, it was an article of faith in new-class circles that television had been taken over by the fags. Now I happen to have known most of the leading producers of that time and, of a dozen, the two who were interested in same-sex activities were both married to women who…did not drink. Neither man dared mix sex with business. Every now and then an actor would say that he had not got work because he had refused to put out for a faggot producer, but I doubt very much if there was ever any truth to what was to become a bright jack-o’-lantern in the McCarthy Walpurgisnacht.
When I was several thousand words into Decter’s tirade, I suddenly realized that she does not know what homosexuality is. At some level she may have stumbled, by accident, on a truth that she would never have been able to comprehend in a rational way. Although to have sexual relations with a member of one’s own sex is a common and natural activity (currently disapproved of by certain elements in this culture), there is no such thing as a homosexualist any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexualist. That is one of the reasons there has been so much difficulty with nomenclature. Despite John Boswell’s attempts to give legitimacy to the word “gay,” it is still a ridiculous word to use as a common identification for Frederick the Great, Franklin Pangborn, and Eleanor Roosevelt. What makes some people prefer same-sex sex derives from whatever impulse or conditioning makes some people prefer other-sex sex. This is so plain that it seems impossible that our Mosaic-Pauline-Freudian society has not yet figured it out. But to ignore the absence of evidence is the basis of true faith.
Decter seems to think that yesteryear’s chic and silly boys on the beach and today’s socially militant fags are simply, to use her verb, “adopting” what she calls, in her tastefully appointed English, a lifestyle. On the other hand, “whatever disciplines it might entail, heterosexuality is not something adopted but something accepted. Its woes—and they have of course nowhere been more exaggerated than in those areas of the culture consciously or unconsciously influenced by the propaganda of homosexuals—are experienced as the woes of life.”
“Propaganda”—another key word. “Power.” “Propitiation.” “Domination.” What does the new class dream of?
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br /> Decter now moves in the big artillery. Not only are fags silly and a nuisance but they are, in their unrelenting hatred of heterosexualists, given to depicting them in their plays and films and books as a bunch of klutzes, thereby causing truly good men and women to falter—even question—that warm, mature heterosexuality that is so necessary to keeping this country great while allowing new-class persons to make it materially.
Decter is in full cry. Fags are really imitation women. Decter persists in thinking that same-sexers are effeminate, swishy, girlish. It is true that a small percentage of homosexualists are indeed effeminate, just as there are effeminate heterosexualists. I don’t know why this is so. No one knows why. Except Decter. She believes that this sort “of female imitation pointed neither to sympathy with nor flattery of the female principle.” Yet queens of the sort she is writing about tend to get on very well with women. But Decter can only cope with two stereotypes: the boys on the beach, mincing about, and the drab political radicals of gay liberation. The millions of ordinary masculine types are unknown to her because they are not identifiable by voice or walk and, most important, because they have nothing in common with one another except the desire to have same-sex relations. Or, put the other way around, since Lyndon Johnson and Bertrand Russell were both heterosexualists, what character traits did they have in common? I should think none at all. So it is with the invisible millions—now becoming less invisible—of same-sexers.
But Decter knows her Freud, and reality may not intrude: “The desire to escape from the sexual reminder of birth and death, with its threat of paternity—that is, the displacement of oneself by others—was the main underlying desire that sent those Fire Island homosexuals into the arms of other men. Had it been the opposite desire—that is, the positive attraction to the manly—at least half the boutiques, etc.,” would have closed. Decter should take a stroll down San Francisco’s Castro Street, where members of the present generation of fags look like off-duty policemen or construction workers. They have embraced the manly. But Freud has spoken. Fags are fags because they adored their mothers and hated their poor, hard-working daddies. It is amazing the credence still given this unproven, unprovable thesis.