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Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall
What is it like to “feel historical”? In Foundlings Christopher Nealon analyzes texts produced by American gay men and lesbians in the first half of the twentieth century—poems by Hart Crane, novels by Willa Cather, gay male physique magazines, and lesbian pulp fiction. Nealon brings these diverse works together by highlighting a coming-of-age narrative he calls “foundling”—a term for queer disaffiliation from and desire for family, nation, and history.
The young runaways in Cather’s novels, the way critics conflated Crane’s homosexual body with his verse, the suggestive poses and utopian captions of muscle magazines, and Beebo Brinker, the aging butch heroine from Ann Bannon’s pulp novels—all embody for Nealon the uncertain space between two models of lesbian and gay sexuality. The “inversion” model dominant in the first half of the century held that homosexuals are souls of one gender trapped in the body of another, while the more contemporary “ethnic” model refers to the existence of a distinct and collective culture among gay men and lesbians. Nealon’s unique readings, however, reveal a constant movement between these two discursive poles, and not, as is widely theorized, a linear progress from one to the other.
This startlingly original study will interest those working on gay and lesbian studies, American literature and culture, and twentieth-century history.
The young runaways in Cather’s novels, the way critics conflated Crane’s homosexual body with his verse, the suggestive poses and utopian captions of muscle magazines, and Beebo Brinker, the aging butch heroine from Ann Bannon’s pulp novels—all embody for Nealon the uncertain space between two models of lesbian and gay sexuality. The “inversion” model dominant in the first half of the century held that homosexuals are souls of one gender trapped in the body of another, while the more contemporary “ethnic” model refers to the existence of a distinct and collective culture among gay men and lesbians. Nealon’s unique readings, however, reveal a constant movement between these two discursive poles, and not, as is widely theorized, a linear progress from one to the other.
This startlingly original study will interest those working on gay and lesbian studies, American literature and culture, and twentieth-century history.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published September 17, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 7, 2023
good content but those sentences were long as fuck i'm sorry
October 25, 2023
Nealon looks at literature from the Pre-Stonewall era to discern how homosexuality was portrayed in a diverse selection of texts.
“As it turns out, the Victorian inversion model did not disappear in the twentieth century, despite competition from psychoanalysis and social-psychological sexuality. Indeed, as both Thomas Laquer and Judith Butler have shown, the idea of inversion lingers on in the psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality, which depends not only on a notion of the two sexes as ‘opposites’ (as opposed to, say, neighbours) but also on a notion of ‘primary bisexuality’ of the coexistence of masculine and feminine impulses in all persons, so that homosexuality becomes a kind of psychical inversion: it is the man ‘within’ a lesbian that motivates her to love a woman, and the woman in the man that presses him to love a man.” 3
“The texts I have gathered in the four chapters that follow suggest that before Stonewall, literary and mass-cultural writing in the United States reflects neither an immersion in ‘pathology’ nor an inevitable movement in the direction of what we now call
‘lesbian and gay culture’: neither inversion no ethnicity, that is, in any pure form. What such texts do illuminate is the tension between them, which manifests itself in an overwhelming desire to feel historical, to convert the harrowing privacy of the inversion model into some more encompassing narrative of collective life. This is why I think of my materials as ‘foundling’: the word allegorizes a movement between solitary exile and collective experience-one that is surely still a part of contemporary queer culture but that is foregrounded in the two generations that connect Hart Crane and Willa Cather to muscle magazines such as Physique Pictorial and lesbian pulp novels such as Odd Girls Out.” 8
“Because unlike the homophile publications, which were largely accommodationist and focused on educating medical and psychological professionals about the ‘plight’ of homosexuals, the physique magazines took for granted from the outset the normality of homosexuality, and-later-a link between homosexual politics and a gay male body culture.” 100
“There is an additional significant to the equation of male homosexuality with male sociability: to locate male homosexuality in the interstices of the social body, as Bob Mizer and some of his cohort did, is to pluralize homosexuality-to prevent it form being understood as a sexuality belonging to single persons. And this displacement of homosexuality from persons to forms of sociability (such as comparing muscles), while it sacrifices the pleasures of femininity and keeps gay sexuality in a perpetual closet, also politicizes it by preventing the isolation of the single homosexual.” 102-103
“These intertwined histories come together in the form of a physique magazine in 1901, when Bernarr Macfadden began publication of Physical Culture, the granddaddy of muscle magazine. Macfadden published Physical Culture, in one form or another, until the early 1950s; but its heyday was the first twenty years of the century, when it enjoyed a circulation of 250,000.” 111
“In other words, in a time of highly pressurized secrecy, print media offered gay men and lesbians the opportunity to begin to identify as part of a group-to imagine themselves in parallel with other, invisible homosexuals and to identify with them through the portrayals made available through sanctioned outlets. From the outside, though, a persistent uncertainty hung around the idea of a collective gay readership: do homosexuals constitute a group? If so, is it identifiable to the outsider?” 113
“As it turns out, the Victorian inversion model did not disappear in the twentieth century, despite competition from psychoanalysis and social-psychological sexuality. Indeed, as both Thomas Laquer and Judith Butler have shown, the idea of inversion lingers on in the psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality, which depends not only on a notion of the two sexes as ‘opposites’ (as opposed to, say, neighbours) but also on a notion of ‘primary bisexuality’ of the coexistence of masculine and feminine impulses in all persons, so that homosexuality becomes a kind of psychical inversion: it is the man ‘within’ a lesbian that motivates her to love a woman, and the woman in the man that presses him to love a man.” 3
“The texts I have gathered in the four chapters that follow suggest that before Stonewall, literary and mass-cultural writing in the United States reflects neither an immersion in ‘pathology’ nor an inevitable movement in the direction of what we now call
‘lesbian and gay culture’: neither inversion no ethnicity, that is, in any pure form. What such texts do illuminate is the tension between them, which manifests itself in an overwhelming desire to feel historical, to convert the harrowing privacy of the inversion model into some more encompassing narrative of collective life. This is why I think of my materials as ‘foundling’: the word allegorizes a movement between solitary exile and collective experience-one that is surely still a part of contemporary queer culture but that is foregrounded in the two generations that connect Hart Crane and Willa Cather to muscle magazines such as Physique Pictorial and lesbian pulp novels such as Odd Girls Out.” 8
“Because unlike the homophile publications, which were largely accommodationist and focused on educating medical and psychological professionals about the ‘plight’ of homosexuals, the physique magazines took for granted from the outset the normality of homosexuality, and-later-a link between homosexual politics and a gay male body culture.” 100
“There is an additional significant to the equation of male homosexuality with male sociability: to locate male homosexuality in the interstices of the social body, as Bob Mizer and some of his cohort did, is to pluralize homosexuality-to prevent it form being understood as a sexuality belonging to single persons. And this displacement of homosexuality from persons to forms of sociability (such as comparing muscles), while it sacrifices the pleasures of femininity and keeps gay sexuality in a perpetual closet, also politicizes it by preventing the isolation of the single homosexual.” 102-103
“These intertwined histories come together in the form of a physique magazine in 1901, when Bernarr Macfadden began publication of Physical Culture, the granddaddy of muscle magazine. Macfadden published Physical Culture, in one form or another, until the early 1950s; but its heyday was the first twenty years of the century, when it enjoyed a circulation of 250,000.” 111
“In other words, in a time of highly pressurized secrecy, print media offered gay men and lesbians the opportunity to begin to identify as part of a group-to imagine themselves in parallel with other, invisible homosexuals and to identify with them through the portrayals made available through sanctioned outlets. From the outside, though, a persistent uncertainty hung around the idea of a collective gay readership: do homosexuals constitute a group? If so, is it identifiable to the outsider?” 113
January 18, 2015
The title of this work was far more intriguing than the content, and made the reader think that the author was intending to explore experiences of intense queer alienation and rejection amounting to a sense of being a foundling. I also, alternately, thought the book would concern the creation of identities within and despite the fact of having emotions associated with being a foundling. Instead, the book meditated on the differences/similarities between conceptions of queer identity as "inversion" (the woman inside the man and vice versa as explaining homosexual desires) or, on the other hand, "ethnicity," which makes of queer people a "people" with a shared, collective, public history. Of course, as the author recognizes, "ethnicity" is a problematic category because it does not encompass the experiences of racial or ethnic difference, and produces a split in consciousness. What at last the author means by "foundling" is an historical emotion that is, at last, a longing for history--for historical narrative.Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews