Leslie Fiedler
COME BACK TO THE RAFT AG'IN,
HUCK HONEY!
It is perhaps to be expected that the Negro and the homo–
sexual should become stock literary themes, compulsive, almost mythic
in their insistence, in a period when the reassertion of responsibility
and of the inward meaning of failure has become again a primary con–
cern of our literature. Their locus is, of course, discrepancy-in a cul–
ture which has no resources (no tradition of courtesy, no honored
mode of cynicism) for dealing with a contradiction between principle
and practice. It used once to be fashionable to think of puritanism as
a force in our life encouraging hypocrisy; quite the contrary, its
rigid emphasis upon the singleness of belief and action, its turning
of the most prosaic areas of common life into arenas where one's
state of grace is symbolically tested, confuse the outer and the inner
and make among us, perhaps more strikingly than ever elsewhere,
hypocrisy
visible,
visibly detestable, a cardinal sin. It is not without
significance that the shrug of the shoulders (the acceptance of cir–
cumstance as a sufficient excuse, the vulgar sign of self-pardon before
the inevitable
l~pse)
seems in America an unfamiliar, an alien gesture.
And yet before the underground existence of crude homosexual
love (the ultimate American epithets of contempt notoriously exploit
the mechanics of such affairs), before the blatant ghettos in which
the cast-off Negro conspicuously creates the gaudiness and stench
that offend him, the white American must over and over make a
choice between coming to uneasy terms with an institutionalized dis–
crepancy, or formulating radically new ideologies. There are, to be
sure, stop-gap devices, evasions of that final choice; not the least
interesting is the special night club: the fag cafe, the black-and-tan
joint, in which fairy or Negro exhibit their fairyness, their Negro-ness
as if they were mere divertissements, gags thought up for the laughs
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