Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (review)

Through exhaustive research, historian Michael S. Sherry's Gay Artists in Modern American Culture argues that predominantly white gay men found themselves at the epicenter of national and international public debates over the United State's cultural preeminence during the Cold War era. These men—composers such as Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber as well as dramatists such as Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee—were considered members in an imaginary homintern (a pun on Comintern, the Communist International) that was held to both exemplify and undermine the nation's attempts at cultural imperialism. Think of it as an arms race with treble clefs directed by Maggie the Cat. For Sherry, these artists exemplified the United States high cultural achievement through the circulation of their major productions in opera, drama, literature, and film. Yet they nevertheless undermined these achievements because of their stigmatized gay-identifications, thereby effeminizing the self-image of a masculinist Cold War nation-state. Sherry convincingly supports this paradoxical thesis through close readings of Richard Nixon's transcripts, plays such as Suddenly, Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, homophobic critiques by Stanley Kauffman, and, brilliantly, the spectacular failure of Samuel Barber's opera 1966 Antony and Cleopatra (directed by Franco Zeffirelli) at New York City's Metropolitan Opera. As this detailed list suggests, the accomplishments of Gay Artists are many. First, Sherry enables scholars to review queer American modernist works in both a national and an international frame and provides a strong overarching thesis for braiding these disparate artists into a thick cultural weave. Second, his book overflows with anecdotal evidence that not only makes good use of its case studies but also incorporates an astonishing range of references to support its layered arguments. An incomplete list would include not only the white gay males already listed, but also Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Stephen Sondheim, Leslie Fiedler, Erving Goffman, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Lyndon Johnson, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, and John Cage. Third, Sherry tracks the afterlife of talk surrounding the national value of queer creativity as it continues well into the present. And fourth, the historian is admirably self-reflexive about his own positioning in relation to his research, oftentimes linking his archival analyses to personal biography and thereby avoiding the trap of an impossible objectivity. Gay Artists in Modern Culture is highly recommended for scholars—and also for non-academics—who have interests in twentieth-century American culture, in queer studies, and in studies of modern U.S. empire. It should become a vital reference for those studying how these three interconnected subjects collided in sound, in print, on celluloid, and on the stage during the pivotal decades of the Cold War era. Gay Artists recently won the 2008 LGBT Award for Nonfiction from the Lambda Literary Foundation. It deserves to pick up several more.