CHRISTOPHER LOOBY

"Innocent Homosexuality":
The Fiedler Thesis in Retrospect

Christopher Looby (b. 1957) is associate professor of English

at the University of Chicago . He received his A.B. (1979) and
his M.A. (1981), both in literature and history, from Washing-
ton University in St . Louis, and his Ph :D. (1989) in English
and comparative literature from Columbia University. H e
worked for several years at the Library of America, first as a re-
search assistant and then as an associate editor. Hi s book Voic-
ing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the
United States is forthcoming . The following essay is part of an
ongoing project on masculinity, sexuality, and race in nine-
teenth-century America with the working title "The Sentiment
of Sex." This is the first publication of this essay.

Leslie Fiedler's famously scandalizing claim, articulated first in his

June 1948 essay in Partisan Review, " Come Back to the Raft Ag'in,
Huck Honey!,"1 that the classic literature of the United States formu -
lated a "national myth of masculine love" (529), may be the most
controversial statement in the whole archive of criticism of American
literature. Fiedler's "full development" of this thesis, in the wake of
what he called ' the "shocked and, I suspect, partly willful incompre-
hension" with which it was first greeted, led him to elaborate his argu-
ment in Love and Death in the American Novel, a long study first pub-
lished in 1960. It is in this later book that he used the curious phrase
"innocent homosexuality" to describe the "archetypal image" of a lov-
ing male interracial couple that he discovered insistently in the novels
he discussed.f My wish is to salvage from the essay what is genuinely

lLeslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!," Partisan R eview
(June 1948). [Parenthetical page references are to the reprint of Fiedler's essay in this
volume . - Eds.]
2Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; rev. ed. 1966; New
York: Stein and Day, 1975) 12. Although Fiedler plainly meant "innocent" here to
mean sexually chaste and therefore morally blameless, the root sense of "innocent" as
unknowing or uncomprehending might serve here to reference the range of issues dis-
cussed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet and other works: The

535
 THE CONTROVERSY OVER GENDER AND SEXUALITY

useful, but that salvage operation requires that it initially be conceded

that the essay does its thinking from within a deeply homophobic and
gay-baiting structure of assumptions. This is true in spite of the fact
that Fiedler signals his progressive belief, for instance, that the "laws
on homosexuality and the context of prejudice and feeling they objec-
tify must apparently be changed to accord with a stubborn social fact"
(529). Such a sentence proclaims a liberal position on the issue of ho-
mosexuals' civil rights, but its weird language vitiates the political
commitment. Why describe the "social fact" of homosexuality and ho-
mosexuals as "stubborn," except to imply that one would erase it if
one actually could? Why qualify the claimed necessity of law reform as
only "apparent," except to hint that although one wearily concedes
that the legal harassment of homosexuals has failed to eradicate the
"stubborn social fact" it vainly opposes, one retains the hope that this
necessity will prove to be illusory?
There is something critically significant in the prominence of such
interracial male pairs as Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty
and Chingachgook in the canonized literature of nirieteenth-century
America, and Fiedler was the first to bring this significance to the at-
tention of the critical community. The subsequent reinvention of this
"archetypal image" in countless artifacts of American popular culture
testifies to its inexhaustible resonance. The partners Andy and Bobby
in television's Hill Street Blues, the Mel Gibson/Danny Glover pairing
in the Lethal Weapon movies, Chris the (white) DJ in Northern Expo-
sure and his (black) brother Bernard, and the protagonists in countless
other interracial buddy narratives, all fit the pattern Fiedler discerned.
(The story enacted by Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in the
movie Philadelphia achieved some kind of culmination in this tradi-
tion: the black attorney as savior of gay white AIDS sufferer.) Fiedler's

sense that homosexuality in our culture is largely constituted by relations of knowing

and unknowing. See Fiedler also at 349n for another swipe at critics who, despite his
care to "be quite clear that I was not attributing sodomy to certain literary characters or
their authors," persisted in thinking that he had done so. By way of contemporary con -
trast to Fiedler in another direction, see James Baldwin, "Preservation of Innocence,"
Zero 1.2 (Summer 1949), 14-22, where the "innocence" in question is the willful
ignorance of the American tough guy, purchased often in violence against women and
homosexuals, with which he preserves his "immaculate manliness" (20) against the
depredations of both, and keeps himself from "discoverling ] the connection between
that Boy-Scout who smiles from the subway poster and that [gay] underworld to be
found all over America" (22).
 C H RISTO PHE R LOOBY 537

thesis opened the difficult question of the intricate historical coimpli-

cations of male homoeroticism and interracial feeling in America in a
way that was deeply enabling, even if (in retrospect ) intensely prob-
lematic. The essential insight - that male homoeroticism and love be-
tween nonwhite and white were "fu sed . . . into a single thing" (53 1)
in the texts he discusses - remains powerfully suggestive but still
largely neglected.
It is only fair to specify that Fiedler deserves credit for the risk he
took in publi shing such an essay when he did , and for the obviously
decent intentions it imperfectly realized. January of 1948 saw the pub-
lication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, with
its revelation that, as John D 'Emilio has winningl y put it, "9 5 percent
of white American men had violated the law in some way at least once
along the way to an orgasm,"3 50 percent of men admitted homosex-
ual desires, 37 percent admitted to postadolescent same-sex orgasmic
experience, and 4 percent were exclusively homosexual in orientation
throughout adultho od .t Kinsey was widely vilified, and his informa-
tion had no immediate effect on th e massive ordinary oppression of
gay people by th e crimin al justice system , the medi cal establishment,
ed ucational institutions, and other disciplinary apparatuses - except
perhaps to alert them to int ensify their apparently inadequate oppres-
sive measures. Kinsey's statistics did , however , have a decided effect
on the postwar proce ss of formation of gay identity and community,
making public a "stubborn" fact (the widespread existence of hom o-
sexual passion and behavior, and th e numerous existence of self-
identified homosexuals) that had a positive value for gay self-
identific ation even as it stimulated official paranoia.
Simply for Fiedler to utter, in 1948, in the pages of Partisan R e-
view, th e name of th e unspeakable love, took some bravado . The
simple transgressive po wer of this utterance should not be casually un -
dere stimated (th e many horrified reactions to his thesis atte st to its vi-
olation of a taboo ), and my analysis of th e problematic qualitie s of th e
form that utterance to ok is not meant to detract from the real service
Fiedler performed in opening a discussion on som e important que s-

3John D' Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Mak ing of a H omosexual
Minority in the Uni ted States, 1940-1 970 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983) 35.
Th ese figures, and the survey meth od ology th at produ ced them , have been subject to
strong challenge since then; my point , however, has to do only with th e cont ext of
scho larly and public opinion to which they cont ribute d in 1948.
4Loc. cit .
 THE CONTROVERSY OVER GENDER AND SEXUALITY

tions. The fact remains, however, that Fiedler's dense, elliptical essay is
one that doesn't altogether know what it is saying. "Come Back to
the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" at once flaunts the scandalous claim
that classic American books are full of erotically charged interracial
male same-sex relationships, but also solemnly warns against misun-
derstanding the nature of those relationships. It is "innocent" homo-
sexuality only that is present in Cooper, Melville, and Twain. Inno-
cent, one wants to know, as opposed to what? The implication is that
there is some other, "guilty," form of homosexuality.
Readers of the essay have tended to forget the overwhelmingly
normalizing force of Fiedler's reassurances . The wish to employ the
rhetoric of scandal - to exploit the force of the gesture of uncovering
a secret truth - coexists uneasily in Fiedler's essay with a countervail-
ing wish to justify Jim and Huck et al. by showing that there is nothing
scandalous, after all, about their relationships. Ralph Ellison observed
that when Fiedler "named the friendship homosexual" he had merely
"yelled out his most terrifying name for chaos," having been unable to
unsnarl the ambiguities of the relationship.f Fiedler brings Huck and
Jim forcibly out of the closet (to use an anachronistic expression) only
to tell us that they weren't in the closet to begin with : They were nor-
mal males all along. The incoherence (and, possibly, the bad faith) of
this critical project is manifest . What's so interesting about claiming
that, after all, Huck and Jim are just good pals?
The interesting thing about Huck and Jim is that their relation-
ship can't be mapped onto our late-twentieth-century system of af-
fectional relationships, a system in which loving friendship and sexual
involvement are crisply distinguished from each other, and "homo-
sexual" and "heterosexual" people are thought to be separate and
well-defined groups. The world in which Huck and Jim lived (the
1840s) did not maintain these categories with the rigor later genera-
tions would do, although the world Twain lived and wrote the novel
in (the 1880s) was beginning to observe these distinctions more con-
sistently. Thus understanding Huck and Jim requires us to suspend

5Ralph Ellison, "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," Shadow and Act (New York:
Random House, 1964),51. Ellison argues that Jim is a figure out of the blackface min-
strel tradition, whose "dignity and human capacity" only partially emerge from behind
that "stereotype mask"; lacking adult dignity, "Jim's friendship for Huck comes across
as that of a boy for another boy rather than as the friendship of an adult for a junior;
thus there is implicit in it not only a violation of the manners sanctioned by society for
relations between Negroes and whites, there is a violation of our conception of adult
maleness" (50, 51 ).
 CHRISTOPHER LOOBY 539

our modern social categories, and try to imagine what it was like for
these two outcasts to devote themselves to one another, having never
heard that it mattered whether their love was "innocent" or "guilty"
according to as-yet-uninvented laws of heterosexual normativity. And
it requires us to imagine how Twain, when he wrote the novel, may
have been harking back to a prior era in which sexual and gender
identities were not so rigidly defined. Fiedler's essay sometimes sus-
pends these modern concepts of sexual identity in an effort to re-
trieve this historical moment, and at other times reinforces modern
sexual categories and consequently presents an ahistorical account of
Huck and Jim.
That Fiedler may have soon realized that this dual rhetorical strat-
egy was incoherent and perhaps dishonest may be inferred from the
kinds of revisions he made to the essay when he included it in his col-
lection An End to Innocence in 1955. 6 For example: "The under-
ground existence of crude homosexual love" (528) in the 1948 ver-
sion was rewritten as "the continued existence of physical homosexual
love" in 1955 (142). Fiedler's reference to "th e fag cafe" in 1948 be-
came "the 'queer' cafe" in the revised essay of 1955 - one epithet
(perhaps slightly less invidious?) substituted for another, and the
apologetic gesture of inverted commas around the word queer holding
the new name at arm's length. The underlying conceptual structure is
unchanged, however, despite the cosmetic attempt to tone down the
abusive rhetoric: It is a structure in which "infantile" and "homo-
erotic" are equated (531), and an ideal of "chaste male love as the
ultimate emotional experience" (530) is held to be unfortunately
"compromise[d]," "destroy[ed], " and "contradict[ed]" by "overt ho-
mosexuality" (529). These expressions represent Fiedler's attempt to
paraphrase, as it were, the homoerotic myth as he believed Cooper,
Melville, Twain, and others had created and elaborated it; but Fiedler
doesn't challenge the queer-hating assumptions with which, on his ac-
count, the myth was framed. On the contrary, he tacitly endorses the
opposition between chaste and unchaste, carnal and pure, "ideal
[male-male] love" (531) and its debased and debasing physical realiza-
tion. At the same time as he reinscribes these tired binaries, he de-
scribes this idealized "chaste male love" as "not adult" (530, 531), a

6Leslie A. Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!," An End to Inno -
cence: Essays on Culture and Politi cs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955) 142-51. Page refer-
ences will be given parenthetically in the text.
54° THE CONTROVERSY OVE R GE N DER A..
'JD SEXUALITY

"child's dream" (532), and so forth , with a rather quaint confidence

in Freudian psychosexual developmental norms ?
In Fiedler's view, homosocial phenomena like "the camaraderie
of the locker-room and ball park, the good fellowship of the poker
game and fishing trip" exemplify an "astonishing naivete" on the part
of their participants because, he believes, the "smug assumption of
the chastity of the group as a masculine society" is unwarranted
(529). Don't the y know that sex is lurking? But this "smug assump-
tion" is unwarranted not simply because there is physical passion "la -
tent," as psychologists would have said at the time, just beneath the
veneer of normal male bonding, and certainly not because this libidi-
nal energy is a harmless variant of human erotic desire . Rather, the
smugness is the problem: For Fiedler such smugness is a dangerous
relaxation of a necessary vigilance, a fearsome ignorance "that breeds
at once endless opportunities for inversion and the terrible reluctance
to admit its existence" (530) . A hostile paraphrase of Fiedler's rea-
soning would go something like this : We're kidding ourselves if we
pretend there aren't fags everywhere (and if we don't guard against
turning into fags ourselves), and unless we chuck this happ y myth of
chaste male love and admit the real existence of real homos they 'll
multiply endlessly .
The implication, quite clearly, is that healthy suspicion rather
than guileless innocence will help us to stop breeding inverts and,
consequently, enable us to preserve the "good clean fun " of male ho-
mosociality. We won't then have to "surrender the last believed -in
stronghold of love without passion " (530) . What Fiedler doesn 't say
is why he would have us preserve this "believed-in" myth of chaste
male passion when he has alread y characterized it as a juvenile dream.
The answer, it seems, is that the alternative is worse : He flinches at
the prospect of recognizing physical homosexual love as a simple (al-
beit "stubborn") social fact, a fact that doesn't compromise, destroy,
or contradict anything except the homophobic fantasy on which male

7See Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition : Love and the Form of Fic-
tion (C hicago : Univ . of Chicago Press, 1987), ch. 5, for a fairly comprehensive critique
and revision of Fiedler. Boone o bserves that "F iedler often betrays a biased view of
'normal' or 'correct' male development, one rooted in the psychoanalytic milieu of
America in the 1950s : for, in his eyes, the freedo m so ught by the male prot agonist 'o n
the run' from society necessarily constitutes an arrested adolescent avoidance of adult
identity and of the mature love emb odied in marital respon sibility" (228). It is evident
even from this brief quotation that Boone 's analysis empha sizes issues of male gender
identi ty over quest ions of sexuality.
 CHRISTOPHER LOOBY 54!

heterosexual identity in modern American society is precariously

built.S
My rearrangement of Fiedler's rather inchoate prose, in the inter-
est of bringing its fundamental paranoia into focus, should not ob-
scure the fact that the most prominent effects of the rhetoric of the
essay are directed against the "hypocrisy," "naivete," and "smugness"
of those who fail to see the "gross" potential latent in the "delicate"
homoerotic impulses of such pairs as Natty and Chingachgook or
Huck and Jim. Those impulses are only "homoerotic in the boy's
sense" (529), and must be carefully distinguished from the gross ver-
sion, presumably homosexual in the adult's sense, to which they may
unwittingly lead. This is a tense rhetorical balancing act, at once main -
taining the distinction between benign juvenile homoeroticism and
harmful adult homosexuality and yet threatening it with imminent
collapse. It trades, as I have said, on the shock value of exposing the
scandalous while insisting that the scandalous is actually harmless.
Such rhetorical tension runs through "Come Back to the Raft
Ag'in, Huck Honey!," surfacing for instance in such statements as
Fiedler's decrying of "the regressiveness, in a technical sense, of Amer-
ican life, its implacable nostalgia for the infantile" (530), in his nostal-
gia for the boyish homoerotic passion that is "at once gross and deli-
cate" (529), nostalgia that is "at once wrongheaded and somehow
admirable" (530). Somehow admirable, but how? Under a show of
being unable to decide, Fiedler remains a partisan of the orthodox
Freudian paradigm of psychosexual development, according to which
a child naturally must pass from immature polymorphous desire to
mature heterosexual genital performance. This paradigm of "normal"
psychosexual maturation depends, as many theorists (including Freud
himself) have shown, on a paranoid suspicion of lurking homosexual-
ity. The normality of the heterosexual depends on stigmatizing the
homosexual as deviant .
Thus Fiedler is demonstrably not saying that Huck and Jim, Ish -
mael and Queequeg, and Natty and Chingachgook are "queer as
three-dollar bills," as he would later recall was said by those who
heard of his essay "at second or third hand." But he is saying that

8See George Chaunce y, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of
the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994) 111-26. Chaunceyar-
gues that in the early twentieth century, as pronounced heterosexuality became the hall-
mark of middle-class masculine style, the "fairy," i.e., the effeminate homosexual, was
"the primary pejorative category against which male normativity was measured" (115) .
542 THE CO NT ROVERSY OVER GENDER AND SEXUALITY

American writers unwittingly and unfortunately privileged a form of

love that was dangerously mutable, potentially transformable into out-
right queerness. He trades on the scandalous power of his claims even
as he denigrates the unworldliness of those who would be scandalized.
He pushes Huck and the others to the brink of the abyss of homosex-
uality only to pull them back to "this side of copulation" (529).
Fiedler wants at once to be an iconoclast and a defender ofheterosex-
ual propriety.
Scholarship has recently begun to emerge that presents fragmen-
tary evidence that sexual relations between black and white men in
nineteenth-century America did not in fact always stop "this side of
copulation," but until further research provides more information one
is limited to provisional speculation in this area. Although it has be-
come a commonplace, for instance, that female slaves had an especially
traumatic experience of enslavement because they were subject to the
sexual abuse of their masters, the tacit assumption that male slaves
were not sexually abused is, at the very least, unproven and therefore
unwarranted. The historian Martin Duberman has published a pair of
letters that bear indirectly on this issue, written in 1826 by Thomas
Jefferson Withers (a twenty-two-year-old law student at South Car-
olina College in Columbia, later to become a judge of the South Car-
olina Court of Appeals and a leading nullifier) to his friend James H .
Hammond (later a governor, congressman, and senator from South
Carolina, as well as a leading pro-slavery polemicist). Withers coyly
writes, " I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your
Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking
and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole - the
exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?,,9
The letters are playful, coy, and lack any sense of a strict demarcation
between carnal and platonic affection . "Sir, you roughen the downy
Slumbers of your Bedfellow - by such hostile - furious lunges as
you are in the habit of making at him - when he is least prepared for
defence against the crushing force of a Battering Ram .,,10 The second
letter features Withers's elaborate dream image of Hammond in quest
of sex: "I fancy, Jim, that your elongated protuberance - your fleshen
pole - your [two Latin words; indecipherable] - has captured com-

9Martin Bauml Duberman, " 'Writhing Bedfellows' : Two Young Men from Ante-
bellum South Carolina's Ruling Elite Share 'Extravagant Delight,' '' About Time: Ex-
ploring the GayPast (New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1986) 7.
HlLoc. cit.
 CHRlSTOPHER LOOBY 543

plete mastery over you - and I really believe, that you are charging
over the pine barrens of your locality, braying, like an ass, at every she-
male you can discover.t'J! These letters may suggest that within the
libertine sexual culture of upper-class white men in the South, homo-
sexual acts were relatively uncontroversial. We know from countless
sources that slave masters frequently used their female slaves sexually;
there is little reason to assume that they did not sometimes use their
male slaves in this way also. The sociologist Orlando Patterson, author
of Slavery and Social Death and Freedom among other studies of the
ideological world of slave societies, has remarked that "anyone ac-
quainted with the comparative ethnohistory of honorific cultures" like
that of the antebellum South would know that "homosexuality is pro-
nounced in such systems, both ancient and modern. Southern domes-
tic life most closely resembles that of the Mediterranean in precisely
those areas which are most highly conducive to hornosexualiry.t'V
These provocative suggestions remain to be substantiated definitively
by detailed historical research, but in the meantime a certain intuition
seems to have been shared by imaginative witnesses as various as
William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. In Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Faulkner described Thomas Sutpen's fondness for naked fighting with
his negroes in the stable, a strange ritual in which by this temporary
status equalization ("both naked to the waist and gouging at one an-
other's eyes as if their skins should not only have been the same color
but should have been covered with fur too") Sutpen secures "su-
premacy, domination" - the compound status of white, masculine,
and respectable of which he is so dcsirous .l ' In Beloved (1987) Morri-
son imagines how male slaves, chained into a come in the morning,
would be made to kneel before the sadistic guards whose "whim" it
might be to offer their prisoners some "breakfast" in the form of their
penises to fellate . "Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in his
head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to
Jesus." One slave escapes this humiliation only because he retches as
he witnesses the sodomization of the man next to him, and the guard
consequently skips him for fear of his clothing getting "soiled by nig-
ger puke."14

1I0p. cit . 8.
l2Orlando Patterson, "The Code of Honor in the Old South," Rev iews in Ameri-
can History 12 (1984) 29 .
13WilIiam Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom !, in Novels 1936-1940 (New York : The Li-
brary of America, 1990) 23, 47 .
14Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Plume, 1988) 108.
544 THE CONTROVERSY OVER GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Indeed Harriet Jacobs in her celebrated slave narrative had inti-

mated that violent homosexual domination was not unknown in
Southern slave culture. Toward the end of Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl Jacobs tells about a fugitive slave named Luke, whom she
met in a New York street soon after his escape and warned about the
slave-catchers who might menace him there. Luke's master, Jacobs re-
calls, had been prey to unspecified "vices" that made him, "by exces-
sive dissipation," finally a "mere degraded wreck of manhood" whose
whim it was to keep Luke naked except for a shirt, "in order to be in a
readiness to be flogged ." The bedridden young master "took into his
head the strangest freaks of despotism," Jacobs avers; "Some of these
freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated.,,15 The traditional
horrified designation of homosexuality by tropes of unnameability -
"the sin that cannot be named," "the unmentionable vice," and "the
love that dare not speak its name" - makes it presumable that Jacobs
was intimating that Luke's master abused him sexually. A Confederate
private wrote home to his sister in 1865 that his fellow soldiers "rode
one of our company on a rail last night for leaving the company and
going to sleep with Captain Lowry's black man .,,16 Although it can't
be positively stated that "sleep with" denoted sexual activity in 1865,
certainly what was being punished was taboo physical intimacy-
though it seems that the race (and perhaps the social class) rather than
the gender of the participants was what made this intimacy punish-
able .
In other regions of the United States homosexuality in a variety of
social forms was not unknown, although again the available evidence
is as yet scattered and partial. Provisionally one can say that there seem
to have been emergent homosexual subcultures in the streets and tav-
erns of various metropolitan areas; these subcultures often overlapped
considerably with communities of sailors and other socially marginal
working-class groups, some of which were distinctly racially diverse.V
(Fiedler himself mentions the "rude pederasty of the forecastle and
the Captain's cabin," but predictably calls it "the profanation of a

15Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean
Fagan Yellin (1861 ; Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard Univ. Press, 1987 ) 192 .
16Thomas P. Lowry, M.D ., The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil
War (Mechanic sburg , Pa: Stackpole Books, 1994) Il2 .
17Perhaps the best source to date on the (homo)sexuallife of American seamen in
the nineteenth century is B. R. Burg, An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The
Erotic Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk, 1851-18 70 (New H aven, Connecticut: Yale
Univ . Press, 1994).
 CH RIST O PH ER LOOBY 545

dream" [533].) In the popular blackface minstrel shows of antebellum

America, as Eric Lott has shown, the general atmosphere of racial
and gender inversion frequentl y licensed expressions of homoerotic
de sire . 18 Frontier communities were another site of homosexual emer-
gence , probably both because these locations (mining camps, ranches)
were often populated only by men and what is called " sit uatio nal ho-
mosexuality" pre vailed, and because men with pronounced homosex-
ual inclinations found the frontier's relati ve lack of social discipline to
their taste. Thus the unmistakably homosexual writer C harles Warren
Stoddard was drawn toward the bohemian arti stic circles of San Fran-
cisco in the 1860s, where he met Mark Twain among others. Twain,
who later employed Stoddard as his secretary in London during a time
when Stoddard was actively exploring that city's homoerotic venues,
referred to Stoddard as "such a nice girl."19 Recently a Twain biogra-
pher, Andy Hoffman, and other Twain scholars have suggested that
during his early years as a bohemian journalist in the American West
Twain's relationships with his inti mate male friends may well have had
an ero tic dimension.I''
It has long been known that T wain's sexual subjectivity was com-
plex and unusual in several respects; the issue is woefully miscast, how-
ever, if it is reduced to the mer e question of whether or not Twain (or
an y other writer, or an y literary character) actually had sex with an-
other man . The crucial point is that Twain lived through a dramatic
transformation in the late nineteenth century of what cultural theorists
call the sex-gender system, the set of rules and norms that go verns the
so cial organization of the related phenomena of gender identity and
sexual orientation. The specific historical transformation here is the
o ne that brought about the emergence of distinct cat egories o f sexual
identity (ho mosexual and heterosexual , i.e. , sexualities defined by

18Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993) 27, 53-55, 86, Il 7, 120-22, 152, 161-68.
19Roger Austen, Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
(Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1991 ) 39, 65-68. Robert K. Martin in
"Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers: The Representation of Male Friendship in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century America," in Hidden f rom History: R eclaiming the Gay and Lesbian
Past, ed. Martin Dubcrman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York:
Meridian, 1990), 169-82, notes that Stoddard and a number of other contemporary
writers "seem to have located their erotic fantasies in the South Seas" (171). The ways
in which sexual and racial transgressions interanimate one another in such circumstances
needs further exploration.
20 Liz McMillen, "New Theory About MarkTwain's Sexuality Brings Strong Reac-
tions from Experts," Chroni cle of H igher Educat ion (Sept. 8, 1993) A8, A15.
 THE CONTROVERSY OVER GENDER AND SEXUALITY

their same-gender or different-gender preferences) where such sexual

identities had not been distinctly recognized before .21 That Twain
came into close contact with various effects of this massive transforma-
tion - effects on others among his acquaintance and on himself-
cannot be doubted.
These and other stray indications of the presence in the United
States during Twain's lifetime of nonchaste homosexuality, sometimes
interracial, may suggest that the relationship between Huck and Jim as
Twain portrayed it represents a deeper and more pointed reflection on
real social conditions than Fiedler would have us believe. In 1881 in
the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal Dr . William Dickinson dis-
cussed a case of sodomy in Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal,
Missouri, a case that involved one eighteen-year-old who was "known
to the police as an abandoned character" and a thirteen-year-old
"street gamin" (roughly the age and condition of Huck Finn) who
was partly persuaded and partly coerced into anal intercourse. "This is
a crime which however frequently committed, is rarely brought to the
knowledge of the police," Dickinson observed .22 Historians of sexual-
ity refer to the 1860s and immediately subsequent decades as the pe-
riod of the invention of the homosexual as a recognized social type;
the mere temporal coincidence of this emergence of a distinctive ho-
mosexual identity with the charged racial atmosphere of these same
decades in the United States (violent controversies over the social rela-
tionships between the races that underwrote the Civil War and Recon-
struction) would be enough to suggest that the analytically distinct
categories of racial and sexual identity interacted in everyday lived ex-
perience and in the public consciousness in complicated and poten-
tially explosive ways. But it seems possible that what Fiedler was sens-
ing was something more than a contingent intersection of sexual and
racial categories in this period. We may at least hypothesize that the
dominant form of subjectivity in this period in America - white het-
erosexual manhood, whose prescribed object of desire was white het-
erosexual womanhood - was constituted by perpetually disavowing
its homoerotic desire for black men. What is at stake then, in the "na-
tional myth of masculine love," is not, as Fiedler would have it, boyish
or asexual desire for the black male other, but a fully sexual desire, a

21The influential standard account is Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol-
ume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage , 1980). See esp. 43 .
22Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper & Row, 1983)
179 .
 CHRISTOPHER LOOBY 547

desire on the repression and punishment of which dominant white

masculinity was historically founded.
In a society like ours, characterized generally by patriarchal domi-
nation of women, theorists like Gayle Rubin and Eve Kosofsky Sedg-
wick have maintained that the fundamental social bonds are those be-
tween men, and that women function as mediators of those primary
bonds. But because such approved forms of male bonding as "friend-
ship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination,
and heterosexual rivalry" entail degrees of libidinal investment that
make them "remarkably cognate" with and "not readily distinguish-
able from" male homosexual bonds, in Sedgwick's words,23 such male
bonds are chronically under pressure to guarantee their own hetero-
sexual status, to ward off the threatening possibility that they are not,
after all, so very different from directly homosexual bonds. (This
warding-off is, essentially, the effort Fiedler's nervous rhetoric collabo-
rates in.) This is often accomplished by casting male same-sex bonds
as relations of rivalry or competition for a female object of desire
rather than as directly desirous relations between men .
Now, in nineteenth-century America, white men thought fre-
quently of black men as their erotic rivals in the competition for white
women; popular culture was full of images of hypermasculine black
men as sexual predators with an all but irresistible attraction to white
women. If in the psyches of white men the most charged homosocial
rivalry for women was with black men (or, more accurately, with an
imaginary black sex fiend), one result would be that the bonds be-
tween white men and black (as aversive as they ordinarily were) would
then be the bonds at most risk, so to speak, of mutating into homo-
eroticism. To borrow from the logic of Freud's account of how para-
noia in men is produced by their repression of their homosexual de-
sire, white men's exaggerated sense of the sexual threat posed to them
by black men might well be understood as a defensive response to a
wish-fantasy ofloving a black man. 24

23Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of California

Press, 1990), 186, 185. Sedgwick draws on Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women :
Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Rayna E. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthro-
pology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) 157-210, and idem.,
"Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Carole S.
Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston : Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1984) .
24The canonical analysis is Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Auto-
biographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911)," in Three
Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963) 103-86.
 THE CONTROVERSY OVER GENDER AND SEXUALITY

These speculations, altogether too sketchy, may nevertheless sug-

gest why I think Fiedler's essay was prescient in its identification of
homosexuality and race as interrelated features of Adventures ofHuck-
leberry Finn. It is important that critical attention to sexuality not be
displaced by interest in gender in this novel and in others that Fiedler
identified as participating in the "national myth of masculine love."
Gender analyses like that of Myra Iehlen tend to obscure the presence
of the homoerotic in the text because, to the extent that the gender
binary (masculine/feminine) governs their conceptual apparatus,
same-gender relations fade from view. To advert to Sedgwick once
more, "It may be . . . that a damaging bias toward heterosocial or her -
erosexist assumptions inheres unavoidably in the very concept of gen-
der. ,,25 Thus while the scene of Huck's masquerade as "Sarah
Williams,,26 may indeed, as Iehlen argues, demonstrate Twain's sense
of the arbitrariness or constructedness of social gender roles, the possi-
bility that gender inversion has something to do in the novel with sex-
uality (recall Twain's remark that Charles Warren Stoddard was "such
a nice girl," quoted earlier) is effectively foreclosed. And the other
scenes of transvestism in Huckleberry Finn remain unexplored by
Iehlen - the King's performance as Juliet in "night-gown" and "ruf-
fled night-cap" (135); the King's naked performance in particolored
paint in "The Royal Nonesuch" (151); Jim's masquerade as a "Sick
Arab," painted a "dead dull solid blue" and wearing "a long curtain-
calico gown" (157); Tom Sawyer's plan for Huck to dress in the
"yaller wench's frock" and for himself to wear "Aunt Sally's gown"
and then give it to Jim to wear during their 'rescue' of Jim from
bondage (246) - in all of these, gender masquerade provides an alibi
for potentially transgressive male-male encounters.
In Twain's later fragmentary story, "Hellfire Hotchkiss" (1897),
which Iehlen invokes as a work in which "Twain expresses a clear un-
derstanding that gender is a matter of ideology [rather than biology],"
to support her assignment to Twain of a gender-constructionist view-
point in the earlier Huckleberry Finn, it strikes me that issues of sexual
identity are again at least as salient as those of gender. Iehlen misas-
cribes to Twain the startling judgment in that text that "Hellfire
Hotchkiss [the girl] is the only genuwyne male man in this town and

25Sedgwick 31.
26Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer
(The Mark Twain Library; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985) 66ff. [Parentheti-
cal page references refer to this edition. - Eds.]
 CHRISTOPHER LOOBY 549

[the boy] Thug Carpenter's the only genuwyne female girl, if you
leave out sex and just consider the business facts. ,,27 But in the extant
draft of "Hellfire Hotchkiss," this observation on the paradoxical gen-
uine maleness of the girl and femaleness of the boy is made by Jake
Thompson, the town baker, who quotes it from Puddn'head Wilson,
the eccentric expounder of counterintuitive apothegms who was re-
vived here by Twain after he had been depicted in his own eponymous
novel in 1894. It is a remark thus at least twice removed from Twain
the author, and explicitly marked as an excessively clever satirical bon
mot. It cannot be taken simply to reveal Twain's "clear understand-
ing" of the constructedness of gender; it might even plausibly be con-
strued as his rejection of such an understanding. But Twain's render-
ing of Thug as a sissy and Hellfire as a tomboy might plausibly be
taken as recognizing the role gender inversion played then in consti-
tuting male (and female) homosexuality as social types.
Oscar "Thug" Carpenter is an embarrassment to his father, who
avers that his disappointing son "ought to put on petticoats" (178).
When skating on the river one late-winter day the ice breaks up and
Thug is left isolated and adrift on an ice-cake, paralyzed by fear and
unable to act to save himself. Rachel "Hellfire" Hotchkiss rescues the
"unmanned" boy by swimming through the icy waters and pulling
Thug to safety (189). This "tomboy" (195) likes the racy company of
boys and the challenge of masculine pursuits in preference to girlish
things, but vicious town gossip eventually forces her to a dismayed re-
alization :
Oh, everything seems to be made wrong, nothing seems to [be]
the way it ought to be. Thug Carpenter is out of his sphere, I am
out of mine . Neither of us can arrive at any success in life, we shall
always be hampered and fretted and kept back by our misplaced
sexes, and in the end defeated by them, whereas if we could
change we should stand as good a chance as any of the young
people in the town. (199)

27Myra Iehlen, "Gender," in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin ed., Crit-
ical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 272. (Jehlen's
essay is reprinted as "Reading Gender in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," see page
516 .] [ehlen cites Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's
America (Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989) 109-10, as her source for the gen-
der-switching Hellfire Hotchkiss quotation. The fragmentary tale can be found in Mark
Twain, Satires & Burlesques, ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1968) 172-203. Iehlcn'sy'Gillrnan's quotation is on page 187 . Further page references
will be given parenthetically in the text .
55° THE CONTROVERSY OVER GENDER AND SEXUALITY

And indeed Rachel "H ellfire" Hotchkiss consequently resolves to "do

ungirlish things" no longer (200). Twain's text is an unfinished frag-
ment, so it would be unwise to assume that his story has any decisive
final position on how gender or sexuality "ought to be." But at the
very end of the nineteenth century, in a society in which gender inver-
sion is widely taken to be the distinguishing mark of an emerging so-
cial category of (homo )sexual deviance, Twain's story seems at the
very least to be not only about gender styles but about the social
stigmatization and painful subjective confusion of two gay kids.
The loving relationship between Huck and Jim in Twain's novel is
misunderstood when the reductive question, gay or straight?, is ad-
dressed to it. It cannot be saved for heterosexuality by establishing
that it was not a genital homosexual relationship. Aside from the vul-
garity and parochialism of taking genitality as the measure of the eroti-
cism of a relationship, it is also an error to think that because the rela-
tionship was not homosexual it was therefore heterosexual. Neither of
these categories was readily available in their twentieth-century form
when Twain wrote the novel, much less during the antebellum time
period when the action of Huckleberry Finn is set . These categories
were in formation during that time period; the reorganization of col-
lective affectional life that the emergence of those categories entailed
was in process; relations between men were coming to be governed by
normative heterosexual imperatives at the same time as relations be-
tween the races were undergoing stressful new reorganizations. The
ways in which these historical processes of sexual and racial transfor -
mation influenced each other had to have been many and various and
inscrutable, and probably were not readily understandable to those
who lived through them then, much less to those like Fiedler who ex-
amined them retrospectively in the 1940s. And it would be unwise to
claim that they are fully legible now, when such events as the beating
of Rodney King and the arrest of O. J. Simpson have generated such
swarms of charged representations in which the issues of race and sex
continue to be intricately knotted together. What we can say is that
Twain portrayed a loving interracial male same-sex bond in all of its
dense affectional complexity, with all of its social inscrutability, and
portrayed it within the ambiguous and tragic historical circumstances
that made it so hard to understand and represent.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

( Continued from page ii)

Gerry Brenner, "More than a Reader's Response : A Letter to 'De Ole True
Huck'" from the Journal of Narrative Technique 20 (1990): 221-34. Reprinted by per-
mission of the Journal of Narrative Technique.
Earl F. Briden, "Kemble's 'Specialty' and the Pictorial Countertext of Huckleberry
Finn" from the Mark Twain Journal 26.2 (Fall 1988) : 2-14. Reprinted by permission
of the Mark Twain Journal.
James M . Cox, "Attacks on the Ending and Twain's Attack on Conscience" from
Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor by James M. Cox . Copyright © 1966 by Princeton
University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
T. S. Eliot, "The Boy and the River: Without Beginning or End" excerpted from
the introduction to the 1950 Chanticleer edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by
Mark Twain. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited of London and Mrs.
Valerie Eliot .
Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in , Huck Honey!" first appeared in the
Partisan Review 15 (1948): 664-711. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, excerpt from Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-
American Voices by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Copyright © 1993 by Shelley Fisher Fishkin.
Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Peaches Henry, "The Struggle for Tolerance: Race and Censorship in Huckleberry
Finn" from Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn edited by James S.
Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious Davis (Duke University Press, 1992) .
Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.
Richard Hill, "Overreaching: Critical Agenda and the Ending of Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn" from Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33.4 (Winter 1991) :
492-513 . Reprinted by permission of the author and the University of Texas Press.
Myra Ichlen, "Reading Gender in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," appeared as
"Gender" in Critical Terms for Literary Study edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas
McLaughlin (University of Chicago Press, 1990). Reprinted by permission of the Uni -
versity of Chicago Press.
Justin Kaplan, " Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn ." Copy-
right © 1985 by Justin Kaplan. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc .
Julius Lester, "Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Copyright © 1992
by Julius Lester. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Leo Marx, "Mr. Eliot, Mr . Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn" from The American
Scholar 22 (1953): 423-40. Copyright © 1953 by Leo Marx. Reprinted by permission
of the author.
James Phelan, "On the Nature and Status of Covert Texts : A Reply to Gerry Bren-
ner's 'Letter to "De Ole True Huck" , " from the Journal of Narrative Technique 20
(1990): 235-44. Reprinted by permission of the Journal of Narrative Technique.
Lionel Trilling, "A Certain Formal Aptness" excerpted from the introduction to
the 1948 Rinehart edit ion of Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn by Mark Twain . Introduc-
tion copyright 1948 by Lionel Trilling . Introduction renewal copyright © 1976 by
Diana Trilling and James Lionel Trilling . Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and
Company, Inc ., and Wylie, Aitken & Stone, Inc .
Nancy A. Walker, "Reformers and Young Maidens : Women and Virtue in Adven-
tures ofHuckleberry Finn" from One Hundred Years of «Huckleberry Finn": The Boy, His
Book, and American Culture edited by Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley
(University of Missouri Press, 1985). Reprinted by permission of the University of Mis-
souri Press. Copyright © 1985 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.