520
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
male with the blood of Cavaliers in his veins--has served as a model.
And what else is left to young men, in any case, after the devaluation
of the grim duties they had arrogated to themselves in place of the
pursuit of loveliness?
All of us who are middle-aged and were Marxists, which
is
to
say, who once numbered ourselves among the last assured Puritans,
have surely noticed in ourselves a vestigial roundhead rage at the
new hair styles of the advanced or- if you please--delinquent young.
Watching young men titivate their locks (the comb, the pocket mirror
and the bobby pin having repaced the jackknife, catcher's mitt and
brass knuckles), we feel the same baffled resentment that stirs in us
when we realize that they have rejected work. A job and unequivocal
maleness-these are two sides of the same Calvinist coin, which in
the future buys nothing.
Few of us, however, have really understood how the BeatIe hair–
do is part of a syndrome, of which- high heels, jeans tight over the
buttocks, etc., are other aspects, symptomatic of a larger retreat from
masculine aggressiveness to female allure- in literature and the arts
to the style called "camp." And fewer still have realized how that
style, though the invention of homosexuals, is now the possession o£
basically heterosexual males as well, a strategy in their campaign to
establish a new relationship not only with women but with their own
masculinity. In the course of that campaign, they have embraced
certain kinds of gesture and garb, certain accents and tones tradi–
tionally associated with females or female impersonators; which
is
why we have been observing recently (in life as well as fiction and
verse) young boys, quite unequivocally male, playing all the tradi–
tional roles of women: the vamp, the coquette, the whore, the icy
tease, the pure young virgin.
Not only oldsters, who had envisioned and despaired of quite
another future, are bewildered by this turn of events, but young girls,
too, seem scarcely to know what is happening- looking on with that
new, schizoid stare which itself has become a hallmark of our times.
And the crop-headed jocks, those crew-cut athletes who represent an
obsolescent masculine style based on quite other values, have tended
to strike back blindly; beating the hell out of some poor kid whose
hair is too long or whose pants are too tight-quite as they once beat
up young Communists for revealing that their politics had become
