“He certainly didn’t want anyone to know that he was queer”: Chal Windzer’s Sexuality in John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown

In the field of Native American literary studies, far too little work has been done that examines sexuality in Indigenous poetry, drama, and fiction. Moreover, little critical attention has been given to two-spirited,¹ gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer Native writers and characters. For example, representations of two-spirited characters in certain works of canonical, straight-identified Indigenous authors, such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, deserve critical scrutiny. And while some (but not enough) critical essays and chapters have been devoted to two-spirited women writers and poets, such as Paula Gunn Allen and Chrystos,² less attention has been given to the output of gifted male two-spirited or queer novelists and poets such as Craig S. Womack, Maurice Kenny, Qwo-Li Driskill, and Chip Livingston.

In fact, critical discourse on textual representations of Indigenous male same-sex desire is quite rare, whether referring to representations within works authored by two-spirited or avowedly heterosexual Indians. The very idea of Native male same-sex desire has proved to be challenging and subversive, in that “gay” or “queer” does not seem to correspond with the popular image of the Native American. Craig S. Womack writes, “the queer Indian, even more than contemporary Indian culture generally, defies the stereotypes of the stoic warrior, the nature-loving mystic, the vanishing American. [. . .] a queer Indian presence [. . .] fundamentally challenges the American mythos about Indians in a manner that the public will not accept” (Red 279–80). The consequence is that two-spirited people have found themselves virtually invisible in literary and cinematic representations of Native Americans, whether produced by indigenes or not. This absence, in reinforcing Euroamerican heteronormativity, contributes to what Qwo-Li Driskill has called a “colonized sexuality [. . .] in which we have internalized the sexual values of dominant culture” (54). Identifying and discussing same-sex desire in the corpus of Native American literature, especially in places where it has been neglected or seemingly “hiding in plain sight,” could facilitate decolonization by emphasizing the continuity of two-spirit traditions across the centuries, even when acculturation seems to have rendered it invisible. Such an endeavor may promote a movement toward what Driskill has called a “Sovereign Erotic,” an “erotic wholeness” brought about by “healing from the historical trauma that First Nations people continue to survive, rooted within the histories, traditions, and resistance struggles of our nations” (51).

I therefore reinvestigate John Joseph Mathews’s 1934 novel Sundown—which has received significant critical attention and is not infrequently taught in Native American literature courses—to illuminate its queer dimensions. Despite the novel’s familiarity in the extant scholarship, only one critic has even mentioned the queer reverberations in the novel.³ Yet Sundown subtly engages with issues of Native American male same-sex desire, despite almost total critical neglect of this facet. This engagement suggests that such concerns are more typical of Native literary production than it might at first appear; hence, more investigation needs to be done within Native studies. Since Sundown is a canonical Native novel, the absence of discourse on Chal’s sexuality indicates a problematic silence and taboo surrounding same-sex desire within the community. Craig S. Womack’s statement about interpretations of the closeted gay Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs is equally applicable to the work of Mathews, who was Riggs’s classmate at the University of Oklahoma: “we need to challenge the assumption of a heterosexual sovereignty that has long held creative responses to his [work] in check” (Rev. 121). While I will argue that Mathews’s novel without a doubt carries queer traces, I do not posit that its author was necessarily queer, in spite of oft-noted parallels between the trajectory of the protagonist and Mathews (see Keresztesi; Warrior; and Wilson). That said, Mathews’s philosophy of sexuality is an area that demands further biographical and archival research.

Protagonist Chal Windzer’s same-sex desire is signaled by two recurring words, the adjective queer...