MUTANTS
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obsolete. Even heterosexual writers, however, have been slow to catch
up, the revolution in sensibility running ahead of that in expression;
and they have perforce permitted homosexuals to speak for them
(Burroughs and Genet and Baldwin and Ginsberg and Albee and a
score of others), even to invent the forms in which the future will
have to speak.
The revolt against masculinity is not limited, however, to simple
matters of coiffure and costume, visible even to athletes; or to the
adaptation of certain campy styles and modes to new uses. There is
also a sense in which two large social movements that have set the
young in motion and furnished images of action for their books–
movements as important in their own right as porno-politics and the
pursuit of the polymorphous perverse- are connected analogically to
the abdication from traditional maleness. The first of these is non–
violent or passive resistance, so oddly come back to the land of its
inventor, that icy Thoreau who dreamed a love which "... has not
much human blood in it, but consists with a certain disregard for
men and their erections...."
The civil rights movement, however, in which nonviolence has
found a home, has been hospitable not only to the sort of post-human–
ist I have been describing; so that at a demonstration (Selma, Ala–
bama will do as an example) the true hippie will be found side by
side with backwoods Baptists, nuns on a spiritual spree, boy bureau–
crats practicing to take power, resurrected socialists, Unitarians in
search of a God, and just plain tourists, gathered, as once at the Battle
of Bull Run, to see the fun. For each of these, nonviolence will have a
different sort of fundamental meaning- as a tactic, a camouflage, a
passing fad, a pious gesture-but for each in part, and for the post–
humanist especially, it will signify the possibility of heroism without
aggression, effective action without
guilt.
There have always been two contradictory American ideals: to
be the occasion of maximum violence, and to remain absolutely inno–
cent. Once, however, these were thought hopelessly incompatible for
males (except, perhaps, as embodied in works of art), reserved strictly
for women: the spouse of the wife-beater, for instance, or the victim
of rape. But males have now assumed these classic roles; and just as
a particularly beleaguered wife occasionally slipped over the dividing
