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

This examination of mid-twentieth-century gay artists fits more within the field of queer studies than gay and lesbian history. Sherry asserts that for several reasons it is troublesome to label figures as gay, and any precision regarding how sexuality relates to an artist’s works is impossible (9). His study focuses on the discourse among intellectuals, journalists, medical practitioners, and entertainment critics regarding the gay or suspected gay men creating American art from the immediate post–World War II era through the 1960s.

As readers would expect, this discourse included denouncements of homosexuality, homosexuals, and their artistic creations. From the radical (Ramparts magazine) through Cold War liberals (Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.) to presidents (Harry S. Truman and Richard M. Nixon), these critics derided homosexuality as perverted, homosexuals as unhappy persons filled with destructiveness and deceit, and the art they produced as inauthentic and insubstantial. These critics concluded that the presence and success of these gay artists resulted only from a gay conspiracy for which critics coined the term “homintern,” a derivation of Comintern, the international Communist organization, and so carrying their idea of its secret undermining of the good life in the United States. Simultaneously, gay artists’ works in classical music, theater, and fiction to a lesser extent defined and represented America. Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire played prominent roles in the promotion of American cultural hegemony as modern and emblematic of the freedom and cultural superiority of American capitalism.

Readers versed in the various studies of gay and lesbian urban communities will be familiar with the discourse against homosexuality and homosexuals. They will also understand the confluence of factors and cultural anxieties that fueled its emergence in the post–World War II era. These readers, and particularly those familiar with Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out under Fire and David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, can savor the layers of irony of gay men serving their country in the Cold War cultural battle.¹ Scholars will find two facets of Gay Artists in Modern America particularly interesting. Foremost, Sherry advances a different perspective on the creation of the closet, advocating that it emerged in this antigay discourse. Second, he offers an intriguing consideration of gay artistic creation and how factors such as marginalization, oppression, and talent played in its development.

The vast majority of Sherry’s inquiry focuses on the world of classical music. Outside of briefly mentioning Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the visual arts receive little consideration. Architecture, jazz, musical theater, and other areas the United States promoted in the Cold War culture are likewise rarely investigated for discourse regarding gay artists and homosexual creativity. Some readers might wonder about the invisibility of lesbians that Sherry found; perhaps Margaret Anderson and the Little Review, Carson McCullers, and Lorraine Hansberry did not figure as prominently in American cultural hegemony. The book’s analysis of the pre–World War II homosexual discourse is short and sweeping, particularly considering some of the scholarship written on Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite these limitations, this book examines a new series of discourse about gay men who were prominent in the field of the arts and letters and is a valuable contribution to cultural history in the United States.