Placing Newton Arvin in Queer History

Abstract

Born in 1900, Newton Arvin felt a sense of “radical difference” as a “girlish small boy” growing up in Valparaiso, Indiana. When he was thirteen, he wrote to his best friend, David Lilienthal, “I feel so lonesome for an intimate friend,” signing off with a daring bid for intimacy jokingly covered by an assertion of masculine camaraderie, “with barrels of love and ki— handshakes.”1In The Scarlet Professor, Barry Werth refers to Arvin's “lonely, inward, deeply shadowed life,” a characterization that echoes the most popular representational trope of homosexuality during the period, and one that certainly had some truth to it.2 But that depiction elides the intimacy and queer community that Arvin found as an adult, perhaps because they didn't always appear in the guises we might expect. About his relationship with his roommate at Harvard, Arvin wrote to Lilienthal of the “very beautiful, very fine, and very precious thing that has come into my life, and very nearly changed the whole seeming of existence to me.” Arvin declined to name that transformative connection, perhaps lacking words for it himself (“damn the English language!” he remarked), but he trusted that his oldest friend would understand at least some of his meaning and more, that his relationship might be accommodated within the flexible bounds of male intimacy that extended into the early twentieth century.3 “It may be a funny thing to say,” Arvin observed, “but—this person stands to me in somewhat the same relation” as he imagined Lilienthal's fiancée, Helen, “does to you and with much the same degree of good feeling (as I guess). You might easily misinterpret this, but I don't think you will, or I wouldn't have said it.”4 The world in 1920, when Arvin was an undergraduate exulting in his first romance, was in some ways less sexually circumscribed than it would be just a decade or so later, when the modern homo/heterosexual binary would take firmer shape. That new world, with its growing compulsion to align oneself according to sexual type, would become in some ways more habitable for Arvin and in other ways less so. Decades later, at a writing residency at Yaddo, he met Truman Capote, with whom he would have a love affair for several years and a friendship for the rest of his life. Capote visited staid Northampton on alternate weekends in the 1940s and sometimes sat in on Arvin's classes, an image of flamboyance and courage that stretches the imagination unless we listen to historians who tell us that queerness was not simply closeted at midcentury, that it could be both seen and not seen. Arvin found love, however fleeting, and certainly sexual connection; he also found sociality in what we might call queer community. At Yaddo, he dined with Canadian composer Colin McPhee, who regaled his colleagues with stories of his love for Balinese men. He took drunken road trips with tomboyish Carson McCullers, who was besotted at the time with Katherine Ann Porter. Arvin cultivated a community of gay friends at Smith College too, especially Ned Spofford, who joined him at his apartment for dinner and to listen to music, to discuss writing and work, and to talk about sex, giving lie to what George Chauncey called the myth of the inevitable loneliness and isolation of midcentury gay life.5Scholarship in queer history, especially historians' documentation of the vibrancy of the postwar gay male urban world, helps us to track Arvin's sexual adventures in New York City in the 1950s and to appreciate his discovery of the lively bar and bathhouse scene there. (Arvin wrote to Lilienthal in 1950 that he looked forward to a trip to New York, to “find[ing] a furnished room somewhere there, and just play[ing] around rather irresponsibly for once in that Babylon.”)6 Later, he found his way to cruising spots closer to home in Springfield, Massachusetts. Historians also chart the rise in gay publishing and print culture newly available at newsstands, drug stores, and corner shops that made it possible for Arvin to assemble his incriminating collection of muscle magazines and erotica such as Adonis and Physique Pictoral.7Queer history also offers a context within which to understand the scandal that ended Arvin's career in September 1960. Arvin was distinctive in his scholarly reputation, but not in his vulnerability as a gay man in the postwar US. His home was raided by the Massachusetts State Police at a time that witnessed the persecution of gay men and lesbians in government employment and the military, the policing of gay life in public space, the suppression of gay representation in popular culture, and, as Arvin's case makes clear, the policing of private queer life as well.8 The police entered his apartment without a warrant, searched his belongings, and read his diary. In the wake of his arrest, Arvin's Smith colleagues, all politically savvy and left-leaning, with ready and practiced political vocabularies to protest the anti-communism of the day, all lacked a vocabulary of sexual politics to offer up a vigorous defense of Arvin against the charges of possessing obscene materials and being a “lewd person.” Indeed, the concept of a right to sexual expression, to privacy, much less the right to be gay, those rights in 1960 were so attenuated that Arvin lacked the political language or imaginary to defend himself.9 He was not alone. His young colleague Joel Dorius, an assistant professor at Smith implicated by Arvin as a fellow member of a “smut ring,” recalled that, after their arrest, he wondered “whether our ‘crimes,’ as publicized, had been too offensive and outrageous to be tolerated, much less defended, by reasonable citizens.”10Much in LGBT history leads us to expect that these histories—of queer sociability and community and of oppression and persecution—will meet and combine to generate political consciousness and resistance. The story of the transformation of oppression into pride and resistance has become an almost reflexive response on the part of LGBT historians, and it structures the narrative arc of many histories. But as queer studies scholar Heather Love reminds us, “[T]here are ways of feeling bad that do not make us feel like fighting back.”11 That queer historical alchemy did not materialize for Arvin. He was hospitalized at least ten times between 1940 and 1961: at the storied McLean Hospital near Boston, at Bournewood Hospital in Chestnut Hill, at a private sanitarium in White Plains, at a clinic in Cincinnati, and multiple times at the Northampton state hospital near his home. Describing himself as “obsessed (literally) with the desire to be psychoanalyzed” as a twenty-year-old, Arvin was reportedly “buoyed” by his analytic sessions at McLean during his first hospitalization in 1940, and he was relieved to be given a medical diagnosis that psychiatrists at the time insisted could be cured.12 In 1952 and again in 1953, he received electroshock treatments—a mainstream psychiatric practice at the time for depression, but also used as for homosexuality—treatments that Arvin characterized as “drastic” and that he dreaded because they caused what he described as “a queer kind of spotty amnesia.”13 He partook of another popular cure of the day for homosexuality—heterosexual marriage—but that, too, was unsuccessful. In 1960, after his arrest, Arvin agreed to commitment to a mental hospital in lieu of jail time, and he eagerly accepted the state hospital psychiatrist's assessment that he matched a classic homosexual profile of arrested psychic development. He tried to commit suicide on several occasions.This is the kind of history, the kind of way of being gay, the kind of person, that gay activists began in this period to disavow and to distance themselves from. Beginning in the 1950s, and with increasing assertiveness in the 1960s and early 1970s, gay and lesbian activists worked to transform homosexuality from a clinical diagnosis into a political and social identity. In doing so, they confronted and challenged the authority of the psychiatric establishment, which, from the 1940s through the early 1970s, cast homosexuality as a mental disorder requiring treatment and, in some cases, carceral institutionalization. As the most powerful regime of judgment and authority over sexuality, psychiatry also sanctioned larger structures of discrimination and criminalization and cast a stigmatizing pall over gay men and lesbians and gender nonconforming people for decades.14The effort to separate homosexuality from the stigma of mental illness would become the defining project of the emerging gay rights movement. Gay activists were joined in that effort by some dissident psychologists and psychiatrists. In 1953, psychologist Evelyn Hooker received funding for a study of what she termed, provocatively at the time, “normal” homosexuals.15 In choosing her research subjects from among her gay friends and their friends, as well as from homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society, rather than from patients in psychiatric treatment, and in questioning rather than assuming homosexuality's status as a mental disorder, Hooker went strikingly against the grain. In 1957, Hooker published findings from her research that showed that the psychological profile of gay men not in psychiatric treatment was indistinguishable, employing the projective tests popular at the time, from that of a comparable group of heterosexual men. Hooker moved to assert that homosexuality was not a form of mental illness, indeed, was not a clinical entity at all, but rather, was, in her words, a “way of life” and even a “healthy life style.”16As activists worked to disavow a stigmatizing, pathologizing past, health became a keyword of early gay activism. Hooker's work was an important part of the arsenal they took into the battle with psychiatry, in their effort to get homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Activists made their case, not by arguing that homosexuals were not, by default of their sexual choices, sick, but by arguing, rather, that most of them were not. The activists' most common line of critique was to criticize psychiatrists' sampling methods by pointing out that psychiatrists based their assumptions about homosexuality as a mental illness on their work with people who were in psychiatric treatment, people, the activists argued, who were unrepresentative of gay people more generally. “Obviously all persons coming to a psychiatrist's office are going to have problems,” gay activist Frank Kameny wrote, “are going to be disturbed or maladjusted or pathological, in some sense or they wouldn't be there. To characterize ALL homosexuals as sick, on the basis of such a sampling is clearly invalid, and is bad science.”17 Sometimes gay activists' claims to health were posed in temporal terms, as part of a forward-looking gay modernity. In this formulation, “self-hating” or “masochistic” people in psychiatric treatment were viewed as atavistic holdovers of an antiquated gay past who were unable or unwilling to join the bandwagon of gay happiness, health, and pride. And so, the case for recognition and rights was made by disassociating healthy gays from sick ones. Don't draw conclusions about gayness from looking at people like Newton Arvin, they would say; look at those of us who are living happy, productive, normal lives.The norm that activists most readily tied to health was happiness. Activists often countered psychoanalytic representations of the homosexual as constitutionally depressed, or of homosexuality as way of life that was incommensurate with happiness, with sunny assertions of gay happiness. The claim to happiness, like the claim to health, can be understood as a revolutionary act against the grain of every cultural narrative of the inevitable unhappiness of homosexuals. But while recognition of queer happiness might be a canny strategic response to dominant assumptions of its impossibility, the mandate to happiness and psychic health for people with a history of oppression and exclusion had a kind of perverse logic. Activists' insistence on gay psychic fortitude, in historian Abram J. Lewis's analysis, put them “in the unusual position of having to argue that as a group, homosexuals were uniquely impervious to their own oppression.”18 And as critical theorist Sara Ahmed reminds us, happiness, like health, is easily naturalized into a transparent good, but often used to reinscribe social norms.19 Ahmed urges us to consider “how claims to happiness make certain forms of personhood valuable.”20 By extension, of course, claims to gay happiness rendered other less “positive” forms of queer subjectivity and personhood less valuable.There was no universal response on the part of queer people to the pathologizing attitudes of midcentury US culture, politics, and medicine. Challenging the assumption that gay men internalized the shaming attitudes of the broader postwar culture, George Chauncey argues that “the truly remarkable thing about 1950s queers was their refusal to play the role assigned them by the hostility of their own time.”21 But while some surely resisted the orthodoxy that homosexuals were sick people in need of treatment, many others located the source of their oppression within themselves rather than the social and political order. That was Arvin's response. Writing to Lilienthal after his arrest, Arvin referenced vaguely “all the behavior that led up to the crisis.” To be clear, he was not referencing the behavior of the police but apologizing for his own.Arvin's history of what he called his “break-downs and crack-ups,” his shame at what he termed his “loathsome affliction,” and especially his inability or refusal to locate the source of stigma and persecution in the social world rather than in his own failings, fits awkwardly within LGBT/queer history.22 Gay activists worked to dissociate themselves from people like Newton Arvin and histories like his; historians have largely followed suit, urging us away from a story of the clinic, or the couch, or the asylum, and instead toward histories of sociality, citizenship, community, culture, politics, and the state. But in doing so, we downplay the salience of shame, trauma, and stigma in queer history. “Is it permissible to write a community history that is not one of triumph or glory but of shame?” David Halperin and Valerie Traub ask.23 Such a history would require that we break from the redemptive trajectories that shape so much of LGBT history, from what Love calls the “heroics of rebellion,” and consider more complicated queer trajectories.24 Arvin's story inspires me to ponder the histories, subjects, and angles of vision we might have lost in the effort to distance ourselves so vociferously from some histories in the name of claiming health, pride, and happiness, and in our discomfort with more complicated, queerer pasts.