COME BACK TO THE RAFT AG'IN, HUCK HONEY!
and having no reality once the lights go out and the chairs are piled
on the tables for the cleaning-women. In the earlier minstrel show,
a negro performer was required to put on with grease paint and
burnt cork the formalized mask of blackness.
The situations of the Negro and the homosexual in our society
pose precisely opposite problems, or at least problems suggesting pre–
cisely opposite solutions: Our laws on homosexuality and the context
of prejudice and feeling they objectify must apparently be changed
to accord with a stubborn social fact, whereas it is the social fact,
our overt behavior toward the Negro, that must be modified to ac–
cord with our laws and the, at least official, morality they objectify.
It is not, of course, quite so simple. There is another sense in
which the fact of homosexual passion contradicts a national myth
of masculine love, just as our real relationship with the Negro con–
tradicts a myth of that relationship, and those two myths with their
betrayals are, as we shall see, one.
The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise
an essential aspect of American sentimental life: the camaraderie of
the locker-room and ball park, the good fellowship of the poker game
and fishing trip, a kind of passionless passion, at once gross and
delicate, homoerotic in the boy's sense, possessing an innocence above
suspicion. To doubt for a moment this innocence, which can survive
only as
assumed,
would destroy our stubborn belief in a relationship
simple, utterly satisfying, yet immune to lust; physical as the hand–
shake is physical, this side of copulation. The nineteenth-century myth
of the Immaculate Young Girl has failed to survive in any
felt
way
into our time; rather
in
the dirty jokes shared among men in the smok–
ing-car, the barracks, or the dormitory there is a common male revenge
against women for having flagrantly betrayed that myth, and under
the revenge, there is the rather smug assumption of the chastity of
the group as a masculine society. From what other source could that
unexpected air of good clean fun which overhangs such sessions arise?
It is this self-congratulatory buddy-buddiness, its astonishing naivete,
that breeds at once endless opportunities for inversion and the terrible
reluctance to admit its existence, to surrender the last believed-in
stronghold of love without passion.
It is, after all, what we know from a hundred other sources that
is here verified: the regressiveness, in a technical sense, of American
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