Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America

4. From Queer to Eternity: Normalizing Heterosexuality in Fact and Fiction

90 4 From Queer To Eternity Normalizing Heterosexuality in Fact and Fiction The decades following World War II in the United States cannot be fully characterized by sexual “containment” nor by “sex panic,”1 not by sexual obsession nor by sexual excess, but rather by deeply contradictory attitudes and practices that were neither fully progressive nor repressive. World War II created a massive social upheaval that had a major impact on U.S. sexual life. The dislocations of war loosened sexual mores and sanctioned a broader range of sexual expression, but the mechanisms of war also produced a culture of sexual oppression, repression, and violence. The postwar period was thus characterized by a kind of sexual tension: a broader understanding of sexual behaviors was met with a narrower sense of sexual identities: homo and hetero.2 Although such transitions were part of a longer-term historical process, the war constituted a watershed. The sexual tensions of postwar culture reflected the changes wrought by decades of depression and war. For enlisted men and women volunteers, the war created homosocial environments in which many gay men and lesbians were able to form same-sex romantic and sexual attachments as well as a new and lasting sense of community.3 For other men and women at home and abroad, the unsettled war years created new opportunities for sexual expression and experimentation. The sexual behaviors and experiences of midcentury Americans were captured, charted, and graphed in the Kinsey Reports, the two landmark studies of human sexual behavior published in 1948 and 1953.4 Both Kin- 91 From Queer to Eternity sey’s critics and his champions accepted the studies as scientific snapshots of American sexual life, and both books were consumed by an American public hungry enough for sex facts to make them best sellers. Rather than accept Kinsey’s “continuum model” of human sexuality, however, postwar readers moved toward a binary understanding of sexual identity: human sexuality seemed either “normal” or “queer.” Kinsey himself felt the terms “normal” and “abnormal” were inadequate, inappropriate labels to describe the complexity of human sexual behavior. But despite his best intentions, the Kinsey Reports had actually helped to produce this binary understanding of sexuality to some degree, by constructing a scientifically quantified “norm” and casting “normal sex as majority sex.”5 James Jones’s 1951 novel From Here to Eternity is a revealingly transitional text in terms of the historical and discursive shift to a homo/hetero binary.6 A blockbuster novel made into a major motion picture in 1953, From Here to Eternity reflects both the freeing of sexual behaviors facilitated by the dislocation of war and the fixing of sexual identities that was part of a postwar impulse to “return to normal.” Although the work of one writer cannot be representative, it is telling that Jones’s personal experiences in the military and his own preoccupations with sex created in him a desperate urge to write—to tell some uncensored “truths” about men and women, sex and violence, and the army. Both the characters and the author explore sexual boundaries in this transitional text, but by the end of the story, as at the end of the war, the boundaries are less porous than they were in the beginning. In pursuit of sexual “normality,” postwar Americans would consult the models, advice, expertise, stories, and orthodoxies found in postwar “fact” and “fiction.” Convergences in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, mental health, and sexology produced a voluminous new scientia sexualis, while postwar literature—newly available in cheap, paperback form, and concerned with “sexual realism”—was being consumed on a new scale.7 In this chapter I chart the corroboration between postwar science and postwar literature in attaching heterosexuality to normality. Sexing the Facts: Psychiatry, Statistics, Linguistics With the influence of Freud and the rise of the field of “mental hygiene,” psychiatry in the early twentieth century began to transform itself from somewhat remote investigations of the “insane” to an equally arduous task: the diagnosis of the “normal.” Jonathan Ned Katz describes Freud’s Chapter Four 92 “incantation of the normal”: “Throughout his essays Freud proclaims the ‘normal’ sexual intercourse of ‘normal’ men and ‘normal’ women as the ‘normal’ object, the ‘normal’ aim, and the ‘normal’ end of these ‘normal’ individuals’ ‘normal’ sexual development. . . . While rebel Freud often devastatingly questions the idea of normal sexuality, conformist Freud was normal sexuality’s prime mover.”8 It was...