So Famous and So Gay: The Fabulous Potency of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein by Jeff Solomon (review)

This is a very ambitious and innovative work in the field of queer studies, whose methodology and theoretical insights make room for new research in a domain that for many may look definitely overcrowded. The book starts from a deceivingly simple question: How is it possible that Gertrude Stein and Truman Capote, who did not live as closeted homosexuals, became mass-market celebrities in a period that censored other public gay figures? (Historically speaking, Solomon focuses on the period between the 1895 Oscar Wilde trial and the 1969 Stonewall riots, although a very interesting afterword expands his reflection on the current cultural production.) The fundamental answer to this question has to do with the distinction Solomon establishes between “broadly queer” and “specifically gay,” more precisely between the dissymmetrical relationships between both concepts, for not all those who are “broadly queer” are “specifically gay” and vice versa. For Solomon, it is the public reception of Capote and Stein as “broadly queer” rather than “specifically gay” that provides the possibility to use the former category as a reading frame that enabled the dissimulation of the latter while at the same time allowing a more or less sophisticated play with the forbidden, if not the unspeakable, which helps understand why the general audience could accept both authors as celebrities.

The term “celebrity” highlights a second aspect of the strange phenomenon that pushed Capote and Stein toward the center of mass culture. To be famous for a writer does not mean that he or she is also widely read. One can be a celebrity—and hence a kind of role model—without being read, and in certain cases the very possibility of becoming a celebrity depends as much on the fact that one is not being read as on the fact that one has many and dedicated readers. To be unreadable can be part of one’s image, and such an image can play a key role in the public production of a literary and cultural celebrity. It suffices to represent a certain idea of (in this case) modernity and queerness to function as a celebrity—an effect that the very reading of one’s “unreadable” books would never be capable of achieving for the simple reason that the number of actual readers is always ridiculously low in comparison with that of those who are informed of the celebrity status of queer and unreadable modernists. Unreadability (in the case of Stein) as well as the fact of being a celebrity more than a writer (in the case of Capote) are moreover important clues in the global shift from “specifically gay” to “broadly queer.” Indeed, the very reading of Stein’s and Capote’s books explicitly invite a gay reading, whereas their construction as celebrities makes it easy to remain silent on their gayness.

A third layer of Solomon’s reflection is the in-depth analysis of the complex relationship between the authors’ self-representation and the way in which their image is negotiated, transformed and in many cases censored by the mass media that promote it. It would however be naive to approach this difference in terms of opposition alone. Capote and Stein—and not only Capote, as is generally assumed—did make great efforts to get known, and they were extremely aware of the importance that “broad queerness” could have in the success of the work that they also—and courageously—produced as explicitly gay. Both authors did use the mass media in a very clever way, less by dissimulating gayness with the help of queerness than by exploring the frontiers of queerness in order to express gayness. The historical and archival research by Solomon makes these points very clear, and the comparison of Capote and Stein—the first having already been a celebrity before having published his first book and becoming a successful...