Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and David Leavitt's "The Lost Language of Cranes"

Abstract

In the photograph that accompanies New York Times profile written shortly after the publication of The Lost Language of Cranes, David Leavitt stands outside his East Hampton home, his arms resting on white picket fence in front of him. This image of domestic tranquility-we are told in the profile that Leavitt shares the house with his lover-is likely to have particular resonance for readers of contemporary gay literature. Here seemingly is the heart's desire of Malone and the scores of lesser lights in Andrew Holleran's eloquent evocation in The Dancer from the Dance of the New York gay subculture of the 1970s. Holleran's doomed souls have fled to the big city from the small towns and suburbs of their youth, leaving behind their families and homes with white picket fences in order to live in world of their own. Now they are caught in irresolvable ambivalence, addicted to the casual sex that drew them to New York in the first place and yet wearied by its impersonality. They yearn nostalgically for the supposed harmony of conventional marriages and careers, yet know that this paradise would also undercut the foundations of their identity.' Perhaps Leavitt had the generation of notable gay writers such as Holleran or Edmund White in mind when he claimed in the Times profile that his contemporaries, heterosexual and homosexual, grew up in the era when marriages shattered behind the white picket fences. Young people in the 1980s now want a stability you have to make for yourself, at an early age, which shocks people 10 years older.'2 In other words, Leavitt's peers have given up sexual promiscuity in favor of long-term relationships, improvising paradise lost long before they had any need to leave it. Philip Benjamin exemplifies this new breed of scarred youth, for unlike Malone the craving for sexual adventure does not dominate his life.