5 - The Queerness of World War II

Summary

The five years or so after World War II saw a wave of novels dealing centrally with male homosexuality. They fall roughly into two groups. First, a group of novels about military life, including Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), covered homosexuality as an important component of their gritty realism. Second, a group of novels set during or after the war, including Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (1946), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950), featured gay protagonists and explicitly engaged the plight of the gay minority. The social mobilizations and disruptions of the war and its aftermath enabled new gay visibility and nascent pro-homosexual politics—but also the deepening stigmatization and surveillance of homosexuality. I argue that the novels named above, among others, attempt to work through the ambiguous social position of homosexual identity produced by the war. Oscillating between pathologization and affirmation, these novels typically prove unable to imagine the integration of gay men into society, even as they are energized by a discourse of liberal tolerance.