The American Dream of Authentic Personhood: Homosexuality, Class, and the Normative Individual in U.S. Queer Male Impostor Films (1970-2009)

Abstract

As a key discursive nodal point of abnormal personhood, the homosexual has been featured in an extensive stream of Hollywood movies from the early 1940s onwards. More specifically, since the end of the 1960s, a series of mainstream U.S. films have come out about queer fraudsters. Impostors assume an inauthentic identity or character, pretending to be someone else than they “really” are. They pass as members of a certain class or high-status professions as part of their criminal means for material gain and upward mobility. If they are, simultaneously, queer, this means that they operate from a closet (Sedgwick) that masks both illegitimate identity and queer sexuality, the latter predominantly conceptualized as abnormal sexuality for long, and discursively assigned successfully to a specific kind of person, the modern homosexual (Foucault). Through their role-playing in everyday and even intimate relationships, fraudsters violate the moral guideline of authenticity prevailing in Western modernity, i.e. that of being true to one’s own, unique self (Taylor 28), the realisation of a core self unhindered by societal forces (Kernis and Goldman 294). Authenticity is individualist and democratic in its setup, insofar as it prioritizes the autonomous individual over a conventional society, and posits an ultimate equality of all persons regardless of (ascribed or achieved) social status. Authenticity is easy to identify as an integral part of the founding national ethos of the US, the American Dream (Adams, cf. Hochschild), according to which success, prosperity, and happiness is achievable to every American through honest effort and hard work, made possible by an essentially egalitarian political, social, and economic system on which the US is supposedly founded. However, while the ideology of the Dream includes the valorization of the unique individual, the simultaneous centrality of achievement and upward mobility points towards an ethical tension between its individualism and materialism, between equality (of opportunity) as a principle and inequality as an outcome. The figure of the impostor embodies much of this tension between the ideal of the true self and that of success and upward mobility. I assume that the relevant stream of queer impostor films signifies a remarkable amount of libidinal investment on the part of U.S. culture in negotiating the relationship between homosexuality, class, authenticity, and as such, normative personhood in general. As extremely concentrated discursive matter on said concepts, such movies offer essential insight into the fluctuations of the moral imagery of (globalizing) US culture: What has homosexuality got to do with inauthenticity, illegitimate class/status identity, and criminality? How has the Homosexual been constructed as antithetical to the American national ethos, and later on perhaps, absolved of such charges? How and to what extent can the ideals of a non-hierarchical individual authenticity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the striving for conventional success and material comfort necessarily hierarchical in their outcome, be reconciled in the concept of the American Dream that wears the taglines of “equality” and “democracy”? Through exploring Something for Everyone (1970), Deathtrap (1982), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) as moral visions on normative personhood, sexuality, and class, my aim is to disentangle some of the inner tensions of, and negotiations around, individual authenticity as essential to the American Dream.