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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 20 Outsiders Abroad and at Home Accommodation to the politics and prejudices of the 1950s was not the only survival strategy adopted by gay men and lesbians following World War II, but it was certainly the most common. A few courageous or cantankerous individuals refused to accept the tactical necessity of lying low, let alone the dominant view of homosexuality as a negative deviation from social and sexual norms. Like the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, and the Arcadie circle, they tended to turn inward—they had little choice—but in different ways and to different ends. Many in the rising generation of gay American writers dispersed in search of safer, more sympathetic climates. For most of them, as for their English counterparts, this meant spending at least some time abroad as a temporary escape or, especially in the conservative 1950s, as a means of better understanding and criticizing American society and their own less than comfortable place in it. For young Americans, whatever their sexual persuasion, the grand tour still meant primarily France and Italy, and in 1948, the first postwar year in which extensive European travel was possible, “a pack of queens,” as Gore Vidal put it, “was on the move that summer in Europe. . . . The peripatetic group that centered on Tennessee, Capote, the Bowleses” migrated from city to city, primarily Rome and Paris, mingling occasionally with the local literati but for the most part with one another. Vidal sailed for Italy in February, immediately after the publication of The City and the Pillar, and quickly discovered that John Horne Burns had been correct in suggesting to him that Italian boys were both attractive and readily available. Tennessee Williams, enjoying the fruits of his first great theatrical successes, also happened to be in Rome, and this unlikely duo hit it off immediately. Before leaving Italy Vidal visited the aged George Santayana and, at a party given by Williams, met Harold Acton, who had ventured down from Florence to inspect, disapprovingly as it turned out, this first wave of the postwar American invasion. 300 | 20-V2660 6/19/03 6:51 AM Page 300 G&S Typesetters PDF proof After Rome, Paris, where Williams and Vidal shared a whole floor in a small hotel as well as the boys they picked up on the streets or in bars. “All the writers are here and the atmosphere is heavy with competition,” Vidal advised a friend back home. Certainly all the gay writers seemed to be in Paris, including Vidal’s present rival and future enemy, Truman Capote. Paul Bowles came up from Tangier to see Williams, and Cocteau, who wanted the French rights to A Streetcar Named Desire, invited Williams and Vidal to lunch. Quite by chance Vidal encountered Isherwood, who was back in Europe for the first time since his departure for America before the war. Isherwood introduced him to Lehmann, whose publishing firm had contracted to bring out an English edition of The City and the Pillar (though Lehmann, like Isherwood and Williams, disliked the novel’s violent and tragic ending). Lehmann in turn introduced Vidal to Gide and invited him and Williams to London to meet the British literary establishment, past and present, including Forster, Spender, Graham Greene, Harold Nicholson, and the Sitwells. Forster invited Vidal and Williams to visit him in Cambridge and showed the young author of The City and the Pillar a copy of his still unpublished Maurice. Although most of the postwar generation of American writers were to revisit Europe often in later years, they never again experienced quite the same sense of excitement as in that first summer after a decade of being cut off. Nor, unlike their interwar predecessors, were they as a group inclined to become expatriates. Vidal eventually settled in Italy, but not until many years later. Only one of the young gay writers who arrived in Paris in 1948, James Baldwin, stayed on, and he did so for the sake of racial as much as sexual acceptance . His most openly homosexual novel, Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, was written in France. By then the trickle of American visitors to Europe in the late 1940s had become a flood; nonetheless, the doyens of the beat counterculture who descended on Paris in the late 1950s were able to attract quite as much attention as their more mainstream predecessors. The gay contingent among the Beats—Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harold Norse—generally set the tone. Their unof...

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