The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture

by Douglass Shand-Tucci

In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America's oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside.

Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in 1882 became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale. Shand-Tucci explores the dramatic and creative oppositions and tensions between the Whitmanic and the Wildean, the warrior poet and the salon dazzler, and demonstrates how they framed the gay experience at Harvard and in the country as a whole.

The core of this book, however, is a portrait of a great university and its community struggling with the full implications of free inquiry. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation's elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Harvard believed it could live up to the Oxbridge model, offering a sanctuary worthy of the classical Greek ideals of male association, yet somehow remain true to its legacy of respectable austerity and Puritan self-denial.

The Crimson Letter therefore tells stories of great unhappiness and manacled minds, as well as stories of triumphant activism and fulfilled promise. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers.

The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. Here is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact upon American culture.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Historical

432 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 2003

Reviews

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Crimson Letter can be called a lovingly traced out gay family tree at Harvard. Shand-Tucci '72 first sets up two homosexual archetypes at Harvard in the first chapters: the Walt Whitman warrior/athlete masculine man (think Brokeback Mountain) and the effeminate Oscar Wilde aesthete (approximately the experts on Queer Eye). Subsequent chapters describe how various generations of Harvard men, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, fit into each, as they lived their lives either close to or away from the Yard. Reading it requires work as it is comprised of dense, reference-rich passages.There is a buried running thread about how male homosexuality has changed over the last century or so. There is not much about lesbians, as women are a recent addition to Harvard. However, although the people mentioned are more or less well known, to claim this book discusses the shaping of American culture is to have a narrow, somewhat elitist view of what constitutes American culture. On many levels this book seems like a historical equivalent of a gossip column with much name dropping; not sure if anyone without ties to Harvard would find it of significant interest.

[Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to anyone who doesn't have a deep understanding (relationship with?) Harvard, as well as Boston history. There isn't a narrative structure, and while a couple of chapters have theories introduced and supportive analysis, it's really a kind of whirlwind tour through the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s and queer life on Harvard's campus.

It of course does not contain reference to the secret court, as this was published before the Crimson found those file boxes, but it's a shame that other than an endnote, Shand-Tucci didn't publish a followup version that included more discussion of the secret court in-line.

The best sections are certainly discussions of Emerson and Whitman, and then the on-campus life pre-AIDS crisis. So many other moments I just wanted actually narratives about - tell me more about the friends who built houses next to each other in Gloucester; where can I find out more about the nude dinner parties on the private island off Nantucket? - but were instead just mentioned in passing. Still, a great starting point with excellent references to follow up with. I wish Shand-Tucci were still alive, so I could buy him a coffee and just listen to stories for an afternoon.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harvard history along a Whitman to Wilde range.