LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

They constitute an awesome assembly of mid-20th Century artists.

"Did others better evoke Americans' joys and pains than Tennessee Williams in 'The Glass Menagerie' (1945) and 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1947) or Thornton Wilder in 'Our Town' (1938)? Did they exceed Aaron Copland in evoking spacious plains, cowboys and rural life, or Samuel Barber at conveying loss in Adagio for Strings (1938)? Who bettered Leonard Bernstein in his musical 'On the Town' (1944) at expressing wartime exuberance or urban energy, or Cole Porter at teasing urban sophistication in musicals and George Cukor in film comedies?

"Who embodied the vulnerable man better than Montgomery Clift ... or a more confident manhood than Rock Hudson?"

The link these artists share is telegraphed in the title of Michael S. Sherry's new book quoted above: "Gay Artists in Modern American Culture." But his subtitle is more revealing: "an imagined conspiracy." He's not out just to praise these giants, but to chronicle the scathing attacks they endured thanks to their sexual orientation. His book, flush with copious references from scholarly and popular writings from the 1940s-1970s, argues that a cadre of straight heavyweights reacted with alarm to what they perceived as a growing gay influence and consequent softening of the manliness of American arts: Hemingway ceding turf to Williams, William Inge and Edward Albee. See Writer chronicles 'Gay Artists' in contemporary America
Chicago Tribune -