World War II was a pivotal event in American queer history. The war put 16 million males in uniform, took them away from their hometowns, and introduced many of them to persons, situations, even self-definitions they likely would never have known otherwise. For those who had yearned for sexual involvements with other men, perhaps since boyhood, wartime service brought unprecedented opportunities for queer sex. Being a civilian in an area with servicemen stationed nearby might bring similar opportunities. Additionally, war accelerated a change already underway in American culture: the spread of the notion that homosexual was a distinctive sort of person, not only a sort of sexual activity; a noun as well as an adjective.¹

Acceleration of that change was partially due to the military’s erratic wartime efforts to discover and expunge homosexual males, who had come to be stereotyped as weak and unmanly, hence unfit to serve. Not only were gay men considered weaklings, they were by the 1940s increasingly seen as mentally ill, a cultural shift that gave psychiatrists fresh prominence in policing queerness.² Although haphazardly enforced, this wartime effort to single out queers undoubtedly hastened American culture’s adoption of a binary sense of sexual identity.³ Because of harassment by military officialdom, yet also because of wartime erotic attachments, countless American soldiers, sailors, and Marines left the service with a sense of themselves that had been tentative, repressed, or even absent before their induction, though some, of course, already had a firm sense of themselves as queer before the war.

At war’s end, rather than returning to their hometowns, some of those with queer wartime experiences settled in the growing queer areas of American cities or simply chose urban living for the anonymity a city afforded.⁴ Others returned home, burdened with shame over what they had done sexually during the war or else grieving the battlefield death of a male lover.⁵ Bigotry consistently enforced was a luxury saved for peacetime. Postwar America was by no means hospitable to queerness, with homophobia and anti-Communism reinforcing each other during the fearful fifties.⁶

There are several published autobiographies, journals, and diaries of gay males who either served in World War II or had at least reached young adulthood by the war years. This body of writing has substantial limitations: Consider all of the diaries that have been lost and autobiographies that might’ve been written but weren’t, or that just never found their way into print. Excluded as well, yet undoubtedly numerous, are those many males who tried hard to deny, sometimes even to themselves, the queerness of their wartime experiences. With those limitations noted, diaries, journals, and memoirs of queer American males who experienced the war are nonetheless worthy of attention – and, strangely enough, they have yet to receive it. The two principal surveys of queer autobiography, Paul Robinson’s Gay Lives and Bertram J. Cohler’s Writing Desire, barely address World War II at all.⁷

Autobiographers, like authors of other histories in which writers have less of a personal stake, run the risk of imposing on their chronicles too neat a pattern, a sense of inevitability – a “retrospective symmetry,” if you will.⁸ Unrealized potential and roads not taken are often ignored in historical works. If one agrees with Lady Gaga – and with countless psychologists, historians, and queer activists nowadays – that we queers are indeed “born that way,” no matter the time and place of the birth, then a queer autobiography might be seen as a tale of realizing, and ideally embracing, one’s queerness. Human sexuality, though, has more contingency and variety to it than that. Even the small number of men in this chapter, though members of the same generation and of sufficient note to have their stories published, did not have uniform tales to tell.

Some of these men will be more familiar to readers than others: Gore Vidal, for instance, and Tennessee Williams, along with James Baldwin, John Cheever, and Paul Goodman. Lesser-known writers are poets Harold Norse and Charles Henri Ford, biographers James Lord and Merle Miller, journalist Ricardo J. Brown, actor and musician Gordon Heath, and composer Ned Rorem. Less conventional is James Blake, who had some fame as a jazz pianist but is also known for letters he wrote during several stays in prison. Lastly, Donald Vining is notable simply for having written the most extensive self-told story in print by an everyday American queer of any era.

Except for James Baldwin, each of these men left us with a diary, journal, or at least partial autobiography. Baldwin is here because he so interestingly integrated his personal experience with his cultural criticism. From Charles Henri Ford, born in 1908, to Ricardo Brown, born in 1926, the men differed little in age. Goodman was the first to die, in 1972; Ned Rorem was the last, in 2022. Most knew several others in the group; few degrees of separation existed in most pairings. Were all to have gathered in the same room, only Ricardo Brown and Donald Vining would have stood apart as strangers. AIDS, which decimated the next generation of queer American men, claimed from this group only Gordon Heath.

Among mid-century publishers, black lives clearly mattered little. The nearly total whiteness of the group robs the chapter of a scope I would prefer. In his memoir, focusing with ethnographic attention to detail on Kirmser’s, a St. Paul gay bar during the postwar years, Ricardo Brown maintained that “only one black man ever came into Kirmser’s, and none of us liked him.” Otherwise Brown “had only seen African Americans – we called them Negroes then – in the navy, at a distance, and I had spoken to only one black person in my life.”⁹ At twenty-six, diarist Donald Vining, who had had many sexual involvements with other white men, observed that “Sharing a room or a bed with a clean negro wouldn’t bother me.” Vining felt “sure I’ll come to it eventually just as I got over revulsion at a good many other things I do now.”¹⁰ In his seven-page “Autobiographical Notes,” the sole piece of James Baldwin’s writing ever actually called an autobiography, race is exclusively at the center of identity, with no mention of sex. In other writings of his, in stark contrast to some of the others, Baldwin would barely mention, let alone name, not even pseudonymously, his sexual partners. Typical was his vague allusion, in a 1984 edition of Notes of a Native Son, simply to “my lover.”¹¹ Perhaps greater sexual candor seemed a white man’s luxury.

Some of the works discussed here covered a man’s entire life, while others, like Ricardo Brown’s and Paul Goodman’s, dealt with just a few years.¹² As its title suggests, James Lord’s My Queer War covered only his time in uniform, from 1942 to 1945. Lord was so adept at chronicling a life that he authored biographies of several others besides himself, among them Picasso and Alberto Giacometti; even Lord’s prep school thesis was a biography of Beethoven.¹³

Donald Vining’s devotion to diaries, like Lord’s fondness for biographies, extended beyond himself. Vining published in 1982 a collection of passages from several veterans’ wartime diaries.¹⁴ But Vining’s own diary was extraordinary, and singularly valuable as a lengthy chronicle of a queer man’s everyday life. He began his diary at the age of eight, and by fifteen his “diarizing finally became a daily discipline and a lifelong habit.”¹⁵ Three volumes of his A Gay Diary were published, covering 1933–1975, with entries for most days of those forty-three years present in the diary’s published versions.¹⁶ A graduate of Carnegie Tech and the Yale Drama School, Vining was once an aspiring playwright and writer of short stories. He set aside those goals in the 1950s, thereupon working for three decades in Columbia University’s Development Office. A serious fan of film and opera, Vining traveled widely and enthusiastically throughout his life, sometimes flying or taking the train, but also riding the bus and hitch-hiking, often staying in dicey hotels. He had the same partner for forty-three years, along with a wide circle of queer friends whose romantic and erotic involvements Vining recorded assiduously in his diary. Along with Vining’s impressive self-awareness, most notable and valuable in his diaries is the detailed, largely mundane nature of the entries. Lacking the notoriety of the other subjects, Vining is yet a central figure in this chapter.

In an autobiography’s hindsight, many authors maintained that their queer identity was already well developed before the war, when most were still in their teens or early twenties. A diary, though, has an immediacy missing in autobiographies. Donald Vining was already twenty by 1937, and his prewar diary entries record his attraction to other young males in small-town Pennsylvania. “Am I in love now!” he enthused: “It’s a blond, with a politely genuine smile, and a refreshing ability to blush.” Still unable to express this affection outside of his diary, indeed still considering whether marriage to a woman might be an easier route to take, Vining sought better understanding of his feelings, gifting himself for his twenty-first birthday in 1938 Leaves of Grass, The Magic Mountain, and a biography of Michelangelo. His identity became less tentative in 1939 when, “after years of talking, longing, and pretending to be the worst homosexual roué in forty states, I have at last had my first homosexual affair.”¹⁷

Growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Stillwater, Minnesota, Ricardo Brown had sex with other boys as a teenager. One of the few boys in his group who, like Brown, did not eventually embrace “the world of girls” told Brown that “the proper word for people like us was homosexual,” and that there were plenty such fellows to be found in New York’s Greenwich Village. On a Greyhound out of St. Paul, Brown “made a beeline for there the minute I graduated from high school.” At seventeen, however, Brown found Greenwich Village and the “dingy drag bar” he stumbled into to be much too exotic (“I knew I wasn’t like those people”). Hurrying back to St. Paul, he promptly took the advice of his father, a World War I veteran, and joined the navy – a move that only intensified his attraction to other males. Feeling profoundly isolated with his yearnings, Brown thought that telling his parents about his queerness was out of the question. He did, however, incautiously tell a naval officer about his queer desires after only being in the navy for six months – and was dishonorably discharged forthwith.¹⁸

Growing up in Chicago, young Ned Rorem told his Quaker parents about his sexual yearnings and doings, perhaps even about his cruising in Jackson Park, when he was in his teens. “They both, I think, considered gayety a phase,” Rorem wrote much later in his wonderful autobiography, Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir (1994). The psychoanalyst to whom his parents sent Ned declared he was “assuredly normal”; Rorem later recalled, “and so I was: normally queer.” A Northwestern freshman at a precocious sixteen in 1940, Rorem “had frequent male overnight guests” in his dorm room. “Promiscuity reigned,” he would write of his freshman year, “we kept lists of those we slept with. My own list grew so extensive, finally so nameless (the boy from the wharf, the man from the beach) that it bored even me.”¹⁹ Over 600 pages long and elegantly written, Rorem’s memoir rivals Vining’s in its worth as a cultural document.

Another superb self-told story is beat poet Harold Norse’s Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (1989), written from the perspective of his eighties. Queer desire emerged early, Norse recalled, though comfort with those yearnings did not. Having had crushes on many of his male friends, Norse at eighteen looked admiringly at the “appealing face and figure of a handsome sailor” in a New York subway station, causing the sailor and his girlfriend to “burst into mocking laughter.” When Norse’s cousin said that was because the sailor “thinks you’re a fairy,” Norse remembered, “helpless against my need, with downcast eyes, I mumbled, ‘I am.’” Two years later, Norse would make subway expeditions to Times Square, and at last “ended up in a sleazy hotel room on Eighth Avenue, where I finally discovered the joys of homosexuality with another youth.” He thereupon “had anonymous sex for six months, [in which] pickups were furtive, anxiety-ridden. You stood absently gazing into a shop window, and if they stopped, you asked for a light or the time; the signals were understood. Sex was usually conducted in secretive silence; even on parting, we rarely spoke. I felt like Typhoid Mary.” He felt better when, as students at Brooklyn College, he and another young poet, Chester Kallman, later W. H. Auden’s companion, fell in love. Shame remained, nonetheless: “Unmentionable to family or friends, homosexuality was regarded as a lurid, criminal act, worse than murder. Cops, punks, blackmailers, pimps, and whores despised us.” Although he was “content with only Chester, [Kallman] opted for promiscuity, which resulted in competitive behavior to show off our conquests.” For Norse, “there was a cost: not disease – I never caught any – but au fond a deep dissatisfaction, a gaping void. It was loneliness.”²⁰ There was none of Rorem’s apparent self-satisfaction.

Living in quite another part of New York – Harlem – yet also frequenting Times Square as a young man, James Baldwin evoked his own early sexual experiences more bleakly, his recollections shaped by the country’s racial conceits and hypocrisies. As a teenager, Baldwin discovered that his “existence was the punchline of a dirty joke. You were told simply that [as a queer] you had no balls.” In the men’s rooms of 42nd Street, Baldwin saw men who “looked like cops, football players, soldiers, sailors, Marines or bank presidents, admen, boxers, construction workers.” Although at nineteen, “on every street corner, I was called a faggot,” when these men were alone with Baldwin, “they spoke very gently and wanted me to take them home and make love. (They could not take me home; they lived with their families.)”²¹

Another African American, queer musician and actor Gordon Heath, raised south of Harlem on Manhattan’s West Side, was sexually abused at eleven at a YMCA summer camp; but he refused to be embittered by that experience. If anything, Heath blamed himself. “I was stupid and cowardly, bullied, tricked, beaten, and raped” by two older boys, he wrote. He also claimed that he refused to let that childhood abuse shape his sexuality: “I was attracted to men and boys and that was that.” The very next year he was back at the same camp, where “the best and happiest thing for me was finding someone to ‘share’ [quoting E. M. Forster] with me.” Decades later, in his memoir, Heath decided that perhaps he had, in his teens, already become too convincing an actor for his own psychological good, too “prone to ‘stage’ my emotions and create scenes with appropriate dialogue.” Interestingly, Heath was said to have been “the first black radio announcer in America.”²²

Although never an actor by profession, novelist and biographer Merle Miller recalled that he too had a childhood taste and talent for pretending, in Marshalltown, Iowa. “I hated Christmas almost as much as I do now,” Miller wrote, “but I loved Halloween.” Hanging around with other lonely boys during the Great Depression, Miller first had sex with another male when he was twelve, his partner seventeen. His was, he thought, the childhood of a “sissy.” Such was Miller’s inclination to pretend, he married Elinor Green after his army discharge, not as an expression of bisexuality but in an effort to appear “normal.” He later wrote that his queer desires were stronger than ever during his marriage; the two were divorced after four years. Two other men in this chapter, Paul Goodman and John Cheever, also married women, and, unlike Miller, stayed married while having sex with men; quite unlike Miller, however, Goodman and Cheever seemed genuinely attracted to both sexes, much to Goodman’s delight but to Cheever’s lasting torture. Miller gradually became more assertively queer: In 1970, after Joseph Epstein, conservative editor of the American Scholar, published a Harpers article bitterly denouncing homosexuality, Miller responded with a lengthy, angry, yet defensive essay in the New York Times, subsequently published as a short book, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual. Miller and David Elliott soon became intimate companions, and remained so until Miller died of peritonitis in 1986. His New York Times obituary, however, coldly declared that, “There are no survivors.”²³

Like heterosexual marriage, military service could sometimes seem to signify a normal orientation, especially when being accepted for such service during World War II required queers to lie about the direction of their desires. Being in the military might also, of course, simply be an expression of patriotism or acquiescence to authority. Of the fourteen men in this chapter, five served during the war: Vidal and Brown in the navy, Miller and Cheever in the army, and Lord in the Army Air Force. Ford was already thirty-two by 1940. The only time Gordon Heath spent in uniform was playing second lead in South Pacific and the lead in Deep Are the Roots, a play about a disillusioned veteran. Similarly, Baldwin, Goodman, and Blake had no wartime service. Rorem received a student deferment, 1-D, because of his enrollment at Northwestern and Williams was apparently excused for a heart condition. Only Donald Vining and Harold Norse actually told psychiatrists of their queer yearnings during their induction physicals. When Vining revealed that he did not associate with women much, his papers were marked “homosexualism – overt.” Norse had said that he enjoyed poetry and had “intimate dreams … of a sexual nature” about men, getting his papers stamped in red: “PRE-PSYCHOTIC STATE, 4-F. DEFINITELY NOT TO BE RETURNED.”²⁴

Whether they were in the service or not, queer men’s experiences were frequently shaped by the war, often profoundly so. Himself a civilian, Vining thought the war brought a cornucopia of sex. Working at the Fort Dix, New Jersey, post exchange, Vining exulted in 1942, “Men, men, men. It’s wonderful not to have to deal much or often with women.” When in 1943 a soldier he took to Greenwich Village “wanted us to pick up a sailor and make it a three-way party,” Vining was still too reserved for that, but by 1944 he had had enough sex to be more venturesome. Of Sloane House, the large Manhattan men’s residence hall and former YMCA where Vining lived and occasionally worked, he wrote: “There are 1200 service men registered and about 900 must be sailors so it’s no wonder I find it a congenial atmosphere.” It was at Sloane Hall in 1946 that Vining met “Ken,” his diary name for Richmond Purinton. “He came over to sunbathe by me,” Vining recorded, “and is giving considerable indication of interest in me, tho [sic] in a restrained way.” They would soon begin a relationship that lasted for forty-three years, until Purinton’s death.²⁵

The American military was well aware that soldiers and sailors might have sexual involvements with other men during the war. Sleeping two to a berth on a train to a base in California in 1943, James Lord, twenty-one, and other newly inducted soldiers were warned by “a world-weary master sergeant” to be sure “to keep your hands off your neighbor’s you know what.” Lord clearly desired exactly such contact, he recalled in his splendid autobiography, My Queer War (2011), but so far had no such experience, an innocence that soon would end. Stationed for special training in army intelligence at Boston College, Lord had his first queer experience when Jerry, another soldier, told him, “I spotted you from the beginning. Takes one to know one.” Jerry introduced Lord to the bar at Boston’s Statler Hotel, “packed with servicemen, several rows deep … maybe 150 … ‘Yes,’ said Jerry, ‘they’re all gay.’” With Jerry, Lord also found a gay club, the Napoleon, where he met Gordon, a civilian, and went home with him. Gordon introduced Lord to several other queer servicemen when Lord returned to Gordon’s place a week later. “Overnight,” Lord happily recalled, “the sexual ABCs had run through to XYZ.” From Gordon, Lord learned of the many places in wartime Boston for queer sex. When Lord asked whether the Boston police were aware of these goings-on, Gordon replied that of course the police knew: “They need food for their cannons, and the police aren’t going to volunteer for the foxholes.” After becoming a regular patron of the Statler and the Napoleon, Lord then frequented the Duck Club, a fancier queer gathering downtown, hosted by “Ducky,” Duckett Smythe, a Boston plastic surgeon. In his brief stateside experience before shipping overseas, James Lord had learned well that the queer desire that he had feared was his alone at his induction physical was in fact widespread beyond all imagining.²⁶

Interestingly enough, during almost the entirety of his time in Europe, Lord went without sexual activity. His abstinence appears to have been linked to disillusion he suffered after witnessing the extreme cruelty of other intelligence service interrogators. Only when the war had nearly ended did Lord meet Roger, a French trooper, whom he would see until he left Paris late in 1945. Of their first encounter, in the gardens behind the Petit Palais, Lord recalled: “We lay there in the weeds, washed in sweat and semen. And when we had kissed, said hello, and made a rally of our clothes, on our way out of the garden, we once again nearly stepped on a copulating couple, two boys this time.”²⁷ His queer war over, the once-innocent American was forever changed. Some of Lord’s thoughts and experiences were quite idiosyncratic – erudition and self-assurance prompted Lord’s wartime meetings with Picasso and Gertrude Stein and correspondence with Thomas Mann. But in other ways, Lord’s experiences were widely shared with other queer soldiers and sailors.

Although Harold Norse’s admission that other males populated his dreams got him rejected for wartime service, wartime experiences gave him a weightier understanding of his country’s duplicities, an appreciation of irony that added depth to his poetry and a heightened sense of his distinctiveness as a queer. Working in 1942 at the Alabama Drydock and Shipping Company in Mobile, Norse saw other white workers beat a black worker to death for being “sassy” to a white man. “Even as they fought the Nazis,” Norse recalled, “the racist fundamentalists were in the grip of their own mass psychosis.” He roomed with various males while in Mobile, having frequent furtive sex with them; typically his sexual partners were riddled with guilt over what they had done. For Norse, the war had destroyed the “hard and fast line” between “Good and Evil,” intensifying his cynicism:

Norse’s sexual “experiences ranged from quickies in hot showers or behind park bushes to one-night stands … With a cross-section of young men from the entire country overrunning the city [New York], it became apparent that our sexual behavior could hardly be regarded as ‘different’ – if anything, it seemed very much the norm.” Norse’s salvation in this cultural atmosphere was his discovery of queer community, especially at Drussies’s: “In a little basement restaurant on Greenwich Avenue near Tenth Street, in 1943, I discovered my first real (yet tenuous) community … [where] the clientele, young and gay, ate good food and entertained one another.” His sense of queer community increased after the war, sustaining Norse for more than half a century.²⁸

After the war’s various disruptions of everyday life and its challenges to long-held assumptions, what, then, had queerness come to mean? What did being a queer in postwar American life really feel like? Even for just the fourteen men studied here, the answer was neither simple nor uniform.

For Donald Vining and many of the friends discussed in his diary, being partnered seemed to be a desirable, even essential, component of being a young gay man in the 1940s. He and “Ken” were both avid readers of How to Pick a Mate and its various tests about relationships. He dedicated his diary’s volume 1 to “Ken” and volume 2 “To ALL GAY COUPLES who by good luck, good management, and their realistic expectations, have made it through the years together.” He once wrote that the “biggest thing in my life right now is my love for Ken,” something for which he said he thanked God in nightly prayers. He was conventional in other ways too, disdaining “the more flamboyant sides of the gay life,” perhaps the reason he could claim never to have suffered harassment for being gay. He also claimed not to have minded the fact that both Bob, a previous partner, and “Ken” each had other sexual involvements apart from a partnership with Vining – as long as Bob “would always cuddle with me right afterward” and because Vining’s love for “Ken” was so powerful. Vining’s remarks about queer relationships recall lines from the Auden poem, “The More Loving One”: “If equal affection cannot be / let the more loving one be me.”²⁹

Composer Ned Rorem’s worldview, shaped largely by atrocities associated with the war, stood in marked contrast to Vining’s. “Life has no meaning,” wrote Rorem, freeing himself, as a queer, from dominant cultural conventions. “We’ve concocted the universe as we’ve concocted God.” This meaningless life could yet be worth living, Rorem thought, as did Vining, with a good companion. After years of extreme promiscuity, in 1967 Rorem settled down with organist James Holmes. The supremely accomplished Rorem called Holmes no less than “my reason for existing for the past twenty-six years.” Tragically, Holmes died at only sixty in 1999.³⁰

The contest that faced Rorem, between boundless sexual freedom and a lasting commitment to one other person, has, of course, by no means been exclusive to queer men in modern America. But the contest clearly has had a singular significance and vexatiousness for queer males, a significance highlighted by Gore Vidal, Ned Rorem, and many others. Vidal at times went so far as to deny a queer identity, as if the fact that nearly all of his many sexual encounters were with other males was sheer coincidence. The alleged only true love of Vidal’s long life, boyhood companion Jimmie Trimble, killed on Iwo Jima, was safely dead for all of Vidal’s adulthood. In print and in person, Vidal, typically without being asked, obsessively denied having any sexual or romantic attraction to a man he clearly loved profoundly and with whom he lived for more than half a century, Howard Auster. Like many American males of varying sexual inclinations, Gore Vidal was more soft-hearted than he felt he dared let on.³¹

Lacking Vidal’s wit, James Baldwin could convey a similar sense of omniscience that may have covered a mid-century queer’s insecurities. His two novels that deal significantly with homosexuality, Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, both have highly conflicted views of being gay, but some of Baldwin’s nonfiction has an astute and distinctive theoretical, hence impersonal, understanding of queerness. “Freaks are called freaks,” Baldwin wrote in an essay, “and are treated as they are treated – in the main abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” It may have been that a fear of his own freakishness, an internalization of homophobia and racism alike, was a profound terror of Baldwin’s own. Harold Norse, to whom Baldwin was quite close, wrote that, “Although convinced that he [Baldwin] was unattractive, he could never tear his eyes away from a mirror. Once, to my astonishment, he said, ‘I look very much like Hart Crane, don’t I?’” Another time, Hart Crane’s lookalike, drunk, exclaimed to Norse, “Look at me! Just look! What do you see? I’m queer, ugly, and black! What future can I possibly have?” It was either self-protection or shrewd insight that once led Baldwin to write – in Playboy, no less – that there “is nothing more boring, anyway, than sexual activity as an end in itself.” Revealingly, Baldwin wrote that queerness would never be accepted as natural, since to do so “would rob the normal – who are simply the many – of their very necessary sense of security and order.” Baldwin’s notion of cultural change was depressingly static: Although he could write powerfully in the present tense about slavery, for instance, to emphasize his kinship with the enslaved, the notion that things had or could become better was generally missing from Baldwin’s writing.³²

The formality and reticence that characterized Baldwin’s writing on sex found its antithesis in the writing of a contemporary: prolific cultural critic, psychoanalyst, and urban planner Paul Goodman. Although Goodman announced and celebrated his bisexuality on seemingly every possible occasion, he was not even-handed regarding the two sexes. “I distrust women clothed,” Goodman exclaimed with customary bravado. “Naked, they are attractive to me like any other animals. Male dress passes – but I have to reach for their penises, to make sure. This has damaged my reputation.” Like Lenny Bruce with a PhD, Goodman wondered, “Why are we so well behaved? It seems to require so few in society to deter the rest.” Interestingly, his brief autobiography, Five Years (1966), frequently refers to “my wife,” but never refers to a male sexual partner by any name or title. There is something distinctly and intentionally seedy about Goodman’s references to his sexual activity with males, as when he said, “I have hunted the wharves from 23rd St. to 38th St. so often that they take me as belonging there, either going about my business or having a break for lunch.” He contrasted himself with other queers of his era: “I think my homosexual needs, involving rough company, catch-as-catch-can practices, got me out of a lot of snobbery, though homosexuality does not seem to have had this effect on the tribe of uptown queens whose reaction against their drives makes them more squeamish and snobbish still.” There was no confusing Goodman with the likes of Donald Vining.³³

Tennessee Williams was equally direct in references to his homosexuality, telling Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko on their first meeting that, “Being homosexual I am very concerned over your treatment of my kind in your country,” and, oddly, following that by saying, “I hope you don’t think I’ve brought the subject up because I plan to seduce you.” Revealingly, after he had lived with Williams in Provincetown for a time in 1944, Harold Norse recalled that one “night, before going to sleep, as we lay in our bunks in the darkness, we discussed the problem of being ‘queer.’ … ‘Homosexuals,’ said Tennessee in a choked voice, ‘are wounded, deeply hurt. We live with a psychic wound that never heals.’” That sense of being wounded, as unfortunate as it was understandable, was common among queers of Williams’s and Norse’s generation, however much some might try to hide their wounds. That internalization of the cultural stigma of queerness surely contributed to the difficulties that some queer men experienced in maintaining relationships, the partnering that some disdained as much as some (occasionally the same persons) sought them. In 1947 Williams met his “closest, most long-lasting companion, a youth of Sicilian extraction named Frank Merlo.” Because “I fall in love rather easily,” Williams wrote in his Memoirs, his companionship with Merlo was hardly trouble-free, but they were still together when Merlo died of lung cancer at forty-two in 1963. Williams took an abundance of drugs during the remainder of that decade, while he lived with Bill Glavin, whose commitment to Williams seemed unreliable and self-serving. Williams later wrote that “most of my life has been spent with intimate companions of a complex and difficult nature.” It was apparently with himself that Williams found it most difficult to live.³⁴

As it did for some others, queer community sustained journalist Ricardo Brown. After the navy discharged him for announcing his homosexuality in 1945, Brown found a “haven” in a St. Paul gay bar, where “still, despite these differences [in age and deportment], we all felt that we were comrades of sorts.” “Kirmser’s was known to queers as far away as Chicago,” Brown wrote, “but most straight people and even some homosexuals in St. Paul were unaware of it.” According to Brown, “the only advertising the place ever got” was when “someone would pencil in a small discreet message like ‘69 at Kirmser’s Bar’ over a urinal at the Greyhound bus depot.” A sense of community like what Brown felt at Kirmser’s was insulation against the fear of losing one’s job, simply for being discovered as gay, that plagued queer men of modest means at mid-century. Although Kirmser’s was a community, it also featured a “pecking order” in which “sissies were near the bottom of the heap,” close to “phonies or elegant bitches,” with “aunties” or old queers at the very bottom. “At the top of the list,” Brown wrote, “were the Regular Guys,” men who, in those fearful times, could pass for straight. At the war’s end, St. Paul’s Winter Carnival returned, and the “gang at Kirmser’s loved it. We were warmed by the crowds, the intimacy, the comradeship of carnival. We wanted, like everyone else, to have fun.”³⁵ Queer wants could be simple ones, but mid-century America’s mainstream culture would not allow them to be voiced publicly by men like Ricardo Brown.

Some queers, especially those in more privileged situations, refused to keep still. Charles Henri Ford, known primarily for his surrealist poetry, wrote what some consider the first modern gay novel, The Young and Evil, in 1933. So controversial was the book, because of its explicit sex, that 500 copies were destroyed by British Customs. Set in Greenwich Village and Harlem, the novel dealt with a group of queer friends who drank heavily, had abundant sex, and occasionally created art. In a diary of highly distinctive immediacy, Water from a Bucket, Ford was consistently candid about sex. “Masturbation is such a low form of pleasure,” he wrote, “a bare prick staring you in the face, wanting to be stroked like an animal.” His partner, surrealist painter Pavel (Pavlik) Tchelitchew, appears on virtually every page of Ford’s idiosyncratic diary, and indeed Ford stopped keeping the diary when Pavlik died in 1957. In Nepal in 1973, Ford met a young waiter, Indra Tamang, whom he informally adopted and took to New York City to live with him in the exclusive Dakota apartments. Ford taught Tamang photography and painting, and Tamang was with Ford until the latter’s death in 2002; Tamang thereupon lived in another Dakota apartment with Charles’s sister, actress Ruth Ford, who left Tamang both apartments in her will.³⁶

In dramatic contrast to Ford, who loved to travel all over the world, jazz pianist James Blake seemed most content in prison, where he spent a substantial amount of time. Better known for the numerous letters he wrote while incarcerated than for his piano-playing, Blake left Northwestern to become an accompanist for jazz vocalist Anita O’Day. When George Plimpton became aware of Blake’s letters, many of them to novelist Nelson Algren, Plimpton had them published in the Paris Review and later in the book, The Joint. Blake was first arrested at thirty-one in 1951, and he spent thirteen of the next twenty years in jail for various offenses, often home burglaries. With both candor and seemingly even some pride, he declared himself “the world’s most inept burglar.” Feeling an utter alienation from straight, civil life, at least partially linked to his queerness, Blake often wrote that he preferred jail; opportunities for sex with other men, after all, were plentiful. To his friend Gertrude in 1956, Blake wrote, “How many times I wished myself back in the joint, the perfect peace I had and did not value. The time to read and write, and goof in the sun, to play the piano indifferently or ferociously as I chose.” And to Nelson Algren a few months later, Blake wrote, “When I left the joint I came out with a brand-new fresh eye, and I was appalled and infinitely wearied to see the dull, mindless, crippling enmity the Good People feel for one another and for all men, the sullen truce they live under.” His sense of being queer, he wrote Gertrude, rejecting any effort to imitate heterosexuals, “is a matter of attraction between two masculine minds, and not a tinsel thing in which one of them must pretend to be a woman.”³⁷ There seemed to be no sour grapes in Blake’s disdain for the straight life; he detested it.

Much less of a loner than Blake, poet Harold Norse treasured the sense of queer community in Greenwich Village. He wrote that the Village in mid-century was “loosely radical, nonconformist, and art oriented, was an oasis of liberation to which, from all over America, young men and women flocked to express their socially unacceptable life-styles. Some like James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams, became global figures, but their early wounds still hurt.” Reassuring as the Village could be, it was no island unto itself, and queers bore the scars of the less accepting places in which they had been born and raised. Indeed, Norse thought that a wounded bitchiness, the direct result of mid-century American culture’s scorn for queerness, marked many queer male artists of his day, men like Auden, Williams, and Truman Capote.³⁸

Brown, Baldwin, Norse, and Cheever had an especially acute understanding of queerness in American culture, perceiving the connection between the culture’s proscription of the queer and its prescriptions for being a proper male. Men who actually yearned for sex with other males paid the heaviest price in this cultural situation, but homophobia (a word not actually coined until the 1960s) took many victims, regardless of whom one desired. As Ricardo Brown succinctly put it, in postwar America

Those emotional and physical barriers between American men had not always been there, but in the twentieth century they had become part of the definition of manliness itself.⁴⁰

Feminist scholars were not yet examining American men’s unfortunate cultural plight when James Baldwin’s essay “The Male Prison” first appeared, with a different title, in 1954. There Baldwin wrote with distinctive insight about the matter, recognizing barriers American culture placed between men of all sexual inclinations. Even earlier, though, in an extraordinary 1949 essay in Zero, “Preservation of Innocence,” Baldwin had argued that “the problem of the homosexual” was linked to problems between men and women, to particular cultural definitions of “masculine” and “feminine.” The “tough guy” who appeared in novels by James M. Cain or Raymond Chandler, Baldwin saw, did not really love women, he just wanted them. In 1949, this insight was singular.⁴¹

Singularly insightful too was Harold Norse’s 1972 poem, “I’m Not a Man.” Among its lines are: “I’m not a man. I don’t like football, boxing and cars. / I like to express my feeling. I even like to put an arm / around my friend’s shoulder. / … I’m not a man. Playboy is not my favorite magazine. / I’m not a man. I cry when I’m unhappy. / … I’m not a man. I don’t want to destroy you.” Interestingly, writing this poem followed by a year Norse’s move to San Francisco, and followed by a few years more his befriending Arnold Schwarzenegger – and, with the latter’s guidance, Norse’s becoming an avid body-builder.⁴²

That an enthusiastic body-builder could be the author of “I’m Not a Man” reminds us that knowing a subject well can be an apt basis for critiquing aspects of that very subject: Familiarity can breed understanding along with contempt. With a profound attachment to certain conventions of mid-century American life, John Cheever was nonetheless also powerfully attracted to queerness. Only in the final stage of his seventy-year life, when at long last he managed to forsake a major drinking habit of several decades, did Cheever seem to achieve at least a measure of contentment, not simply raw pleasure, in his queer desire. It was surely Cheever’s genuine bisexuality, his being pulled in two directions that his culture told him (and he chose to believe) were so diametrically opposite to each other, that was at the heart of his decades of pain. Yet Cheever’s torture was also the very foundation of his talent – the gift that gave us some fine novels and arguably the best short fiction in twentieth-century American writing. As Mary Gordon astutely wrote, “One wishes he could have been less tormented, less split. But then he would not have had a subject. THE MISERY OF A GROWN MAN.”⁴³ The published Journals of John Cheever begin early in the postwar period and end only in 1982, the year of his death, at seventy. Falconer, published in 1977, was Cheever’s only novel to prominently feature queerness (indeed, it was the novel’s central theme), and the topic seldom appeared in his short stories.⁴⁴ In the privacy of his Journals, however, the matter comes up often, increasingly so as the date of Falconer’s appearance neared.⁴⁵ When it came to bedeviled men, Cheever knew what he was writing about.

The fourteen men who populate this chapter give fresh significance to some venerable issues in queer studies and fresh evidence regarding some important matters in queer history. How central was World War II to the queer experience? Clearly, the war was of tremendous significance to queerness as a whole in the United States, but of vastly varying import to individual queer men. The closet metaphor is useful for examining some men’s lives, irrelevant for others. The popular notion that, as David Johnson critiqued it, “gay men and lesbians led isolated, lonely lives prior to World War II or even prior to the 1960’s” is utterly discredited by many of the fourteen stories presented here.⁴⁶ The widespread existence and great significance of a sense of queer community, even before the war, and the prevalence of queer male coupling, are clear in these pages, as is “gay’s” frequency as a word of self-definition.

Much evidence presented here does not paint a pretty picture: These were still years of widespread misery for queer Americans, who, despite numerous instances of community, coupling, and accomplishment, still lived in a society whose dominant culture characterized them as detestable outcasts. Wealth and status might help, but just a bit. It was not only Donald Vining’s diary that recorded concerns as mundane as returning a sweater to a department store. All fourteen of the men discussed in this chapter shared most of the everyday concerns, virtues, and vices of most human beings. It was the dominant culture of mid-century America that was warped – for considering these men irreparably damaged solely because they desired sex with other males. I assuredly am not suggesting that that desire was unimportant but simply that it was no grounds for treating people poorly. Better years lay ahead, but even at the time of this writing, American queerness is clearly not home free.