An African-American's Representation of Internalized Homophobia During the Early 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chester Himes's novel Cast the First Stone is an avowedly autobiographical account of the prison world Himes knew from his incarceration during the late 1920s and early 1930s in an Ohio state prison (where he had been sentenced to a twenty-year sentence for robbery). Paying relatively little attention to the melodramatic plot, this article takes the novel as a reliable representation of the sexual attitudes and sexual culture of prison life in early twentieth-century America. Gender-stratified homosexuality (in which the “wolf” sexually uses the “fag,” who casts himself or is cast as feminine) is routine. Ungendered (proto-“gay”) homosexual relations and love (in contrast to sex) threaten this cosmology and are ruthlessly suppressed by other prisoners and (albeit with more anguish) by the novel's narrator, a “Mississippi white boy.” Although the racial dynamics of prison homosexuality were elided by this authorial choice of perspective (after the manuscript had been rejected by Henry Holt), the book nonetheless provides an insider account of prison homoeroticism, the insistence on gendering sexual relations there, and the inability of the narrator to accept the love of the portentously named Duke Dido.