Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America by Guy Davidson (review)

Guy Davidson's Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America offers a useful study of queer sexuality in midcentury American literary culture. Davidson examines three major queer authors—James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal—to show that their sexually ambiguous public personas helped raise homosexuality and bisexuality to "proto-visibility" in the media (4). Building on celebrity theory, Davidson demonstrates that celebrity culture's persistent concern with the private lives of notable figures allowed these famous authors to draw attention to the open secret of same-sex desire, transforming gay and lesbian intimacy into matters of public concern. Although Baldwin, Sontag, and Vidal often resisted sexual labels, they nevertheless served as important precursors to gay liberation's call to come out of the closet. By emphasizing the influence of queer-identified celebrities, Davidson critiques theorists who have underplayed the importance of prioritizing visibility and public representation in queer politics.

Davidson's book is engagingly written, deftly blending historical anecdotes with close readings and theoretical analysis. Although Categorically Famous's case studies are quite detailed and focused—each author receives two chapters—the book moves briskly through its examples. Davidson succeeds in providing a fresh perspective on iconic moments in the media history of American sexuality, offering new insights about Sontag's "Notes on Camp" and William F. Buckley's infamous homophobic outburst on national television. For this reason, it deserves a wider audience beyond scholars interested in midcentury literature and criticism.

The chapters on Baldwin argue that the author's writing treats homosexuality as a form of personal shame that causes the subject to turn inward on himself. Throughout his work, Baldwin resisted queer community because, like many conventionally masculine homosexual authors during this period, he stereotyped gay subculture as effeminate and pathetic. Davidson suggests that Baldwin's impulse to privatize homosexuality in Another Country, Giovanni's Room, and his other writings was met with a countervailing tendency to find connection through love, discovering in erotic life a more collective dimension that presaged post-Stonewall pride.

Turning to Sontag, Davidson looks past her well-known professions of impersonality to subtle moments of self-disclosure. Davidson begins with a clever reading of Sontag's shadowy but glamorous dust jacket photo, which came to exemplify the allure of the mysterious starlet whose enigmatic nature only makes the viewer want to know more. Through this strategy, Sontag was able to both reveal and conceal the queer sexuality that secretly motivated much of her writing. In the passages that follow, Davidson goes on to show that Sontag used camp artifice to overturn the high seriousness of the grossly sexist New York intellectuals who tried to cast her in a domestic role. Even more exciting, Davidson recovers "Notes on Camp" from critiques that suggest it represents a defanged appropriation of queerness that ultimately erases gay men by showing how the essay emerged from Sontag's complicated but close relationships with queer authors such as Elliott Stein and Alfred Chester. Interestingly, Stein's chaotic collection of outré keepsakes turns out to be the inspiration for both Sontag's essay and the messy space referenced in the title of Giovanni's Room. Sontag ultimately distanced herself from her most famous essay, which came to represent her attempts to grapple with both her bisexuality and her sudden fame.

The final chapters on Vidal represent the most methodologically interesting engagements with literary celebrity. The first deals with Vidal's promotional campaign for the raucously camp novel Myra Breckinridge, in which he toured with the enormous chorus-girl statue featured in the book. According to Davidson, Vidal turned the novel's transgender protagonist into a celebrity whose "virtual" status allowed her to become a safe surrogate for the author's private views about sexuality, including the idea that bisexuality is a universal disposition (142). The next chapter, however, shows that Vidal's attraction to men did...