I can't really say I'm an opera queen. More like its poor cousin, the musical theater queen. Even before I knew I was gay, I had a shelf full of original cast albumsThe Sound of Music, Camelot, South Pacific, Hello, Dolly!and would play them over and over and over, singing along, a candle or a brush for microphone. What I lived forwhat every musical theater or opera queen lives foris the moment, often the first-act closerwhen the female lead steps out of the banal plot and belts out her showstopper. It's a transcendent moment, for the diva and for her fans. For her, it's when the sheer force of her excessive emotions, gestures, and talent releases her from the mortifying conventionality that, elsewhere in the musical, threatens to suppress her voice. For the audienceat least for some in the audienceit's also a transcendent moment. The star is singing our lives, our desire to move from stifling silence to soaring, unembarrassed self-expression. Our mouths mouth her words (of course we know the lyrics), our bodies ready for explosive appreciation when she lets the last note fall to the ground. For a brief time, we vibrate with the possibility of being elsewhere and being otherwise before having to face those around us, perhaps less enthusiastic than we, and account, however implicitly, for our fervent enthusiasm, our unmediated connection with the song and the singer, our love. It's yet another love that dare not speak its name.In The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum describes this moment of combined shame and transcendence in relation to the opera queenthe gay man who follows opera obsessively, knows every flop and triumph in his favorite divas' lives, makes fetishes of box sets and programs, turning all that into an enduring expression of gay repression and freedom. The diva, for the opera queen, is both surrogate and heroine, singing from an erased, invisible place in the universe (11) also inhabited by her gay fans. Dramatizing an ordinariness touched by sublimity (85), she brings hints of tremendousness where there was once shame (90). The diva stands alone, alienated, often heartbroken, disappointed, but she is also in an other place where our conventions are no longer imperatives, where she needs no one because her voice is beyond reach and her desires are not errors but arias.Whether or not he was one, I imagine Newton Arvin as an opera queen. That is, I don't picture him frustrated and furtive, his eroticism defiled by the cheesy photos in physique magazines, small, ashamed, repressed. That's the portrait that emerges from his ultimate catastrophe. That picture turns aloneness into loneliness, an image of the bachelor that invites the smirk of pity if not the scowl of disapproval. In turning Arvin into an opera queen, I don't mean to make light of his sometime sad and destructive life; rather, I intend to celebrate the passion, courage, hopefulness, devotion, imagination, even at times vision evident in his scholarship, all of which are too easy to overlook when we turn Arvin from a writer to a biography.So, my Arvin was an opera queen, a stereotype perhaps, but one that fills solitude with pleasure and makes the single man an expert, a romantic, and a devotee. The opera queen, as Koestenbaum tells us, did not put life on hold but lived for something, sometimes with a tinge of embarrassment but also with dedication and style. The opera queen could, on the outside, seem plain, prim, even dowdy (I think of the photo of Arvin, bespectacled, tight-lipped, prim, on the cover of Barry Werth's biography), but inside he is all passion, sensuousness, high seriousness, and imagination. He is not the object of bad destinies and irremediable oppositions; he transforms them into art. No longer in the closet, he is in the record store, front and center in the stalls or up in the highest balcony, backstage mobbing the dressing room. I don't know whether Arvin liked opera (although few upwardly aspiring gay intellectuals of his generation wouldn't at least have tried to like it), but that doesn't matter. One doesn't need the inventory of his record collection to see that he had the soul, if not the tastes, of an opera queen. One need only read his criticism.I characterize Arvin as an opera queen for historical and historiographic reasons. The opera queen, as Koestenbaum notes, is a significant figure in the history of sexuality. Using standards of post-Stonewall proud self-proclamation (which, in Eric Sawyer and Harley Erdman's 2017 opera, The Scarlet Professor, mark the divide between Arvin and his younger gay friend, Ned Spofford, and lead to the latter's dismissal of Arvin), we might deride the opera queen as lonely, pathetic, perverted, resorting to crude representations rather than seeking real relationships (Koestenbaum 30). But who have historically been the custodians of passion and perseverance, of imagination and pleasure, if not gay men, especially the stereotypical ones who made culture during times of direst persecution? And one of the earliest archivists of those often-disparaged traits was the opera queen, who has been an integral part of gay culture from its inception. In that context, figuring Arvin as an opera queen reframes his story, not as one of tragic solitude and cowardice, but as that of someone who, in playwright Tony Kushner's words, transformed a culture of oppression into marvels of metaphoric transpiration, adaptation and survival (3). It is worth recalling not only that Arvin was the victim, not the cause, of state homophobia, that his furtive sexuality didn't bring on the police but the other way around, and also that he had adapted and survived as a gay man for sixty years prior to his arrest, even during the decade of virulent state persecution epitomized by Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. So, I claim Arvin for queer history, faults and all, because, like the opera queens Koestenbaum and Kushner celebrate, he was a passionate man who put his devotion and admiration not into song but into criticism. Arvin came out in his criticism, in his daring investigation of Hawthorne's troubled homosexuality, of Walt Whitman's exuberant camaraderie, and of Herman Melville's satisfying realization that love is what binds people together. We don't yet have a thorough history of criticism as a distinctive history of sexuality, but when that is compiled, Arvin's career deserves to be one of its central chapters.So, if Arvin was an opera queen, who was his diva? The answer is Hester Prynne, the woman who on the scaffold took center stage and refused to relinquish it, who wore an outlandish costume as the wronged but unrepentant object of men's unyielding moralism and unreliable desires, who was willing but never had to die for her passion. And since [i]dolizing grand women from the past and making them come back, Koestenbaum observes, are pursuits dear to gay culture (50), we might recognize Arvin's (and Hawthorne's) retrieval of the ancestor of all grand women, Hester Prynne, as a notably queer act.In his 1929 Hawthorne, Arvin introduces Hester with just such a gesture of queer revival, stating of the symbol intended to shame her, [T]he A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything rather than Adulteress (152). For Arvin, Hester emerges from so terrible a loneliness (153) that he blames for turning the luxuriance and warmth of her personality into a kind of blight, into what he also describes as austerity, coldness, and a rigid strength (188). Despite this mortification of Hester's spirit, however, Arvin knows that in that moment of tribulation, the diva has lost neither passion nor feeling. Rather, [H]er thinking itself becomes bolder and more speculative, expressive not so much of her whole being as of a specialized and unwomanly function. At length, Arvin continues, she loses her clear sense of human realitiesloses it so far as to suppose that she and Dimmesdale can achieve happiness by mere escape from the dangers and difficulties that beset them separately (18889). This is Violetta in La Traviata, abandoned and abused, accused wrongly, self-sacrificing, but wiser, and with a more powerful talent than ever, evoking the response for which she has waited: as Roger Chillingworth says to Hester, I pity thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature!' (189). If Hester must share in the miserable destinies (187) of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, unlike them she survivesas most divas don'tbecause, unlike the men in her life, she has become bolder, speculative, imaginative, believing (and does she ever really abandon that belief, as Arvin suggests?) in the transcendence that leaves conventional realities behind. If her bodylike the oversize body of the divahas become unwomanly, it has gained its own specialized power, the capacity (the one Arvin most admired) for transforming pain into art.For opera queens, it is the emotion the diva calls forth from them that connects them to her momentary transcendence. So it was for Arvin and Hester. The fatesnot tragic, just carelessof Dimmesdale and Chillingworth follow from their refusal to identify with Hester. Whereas her isolation is power, allowing for imaginative speculation (remember the ghostly figures who visit Hester in the night) that fosters connections with others alienated from humdrum normality, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth are simply alone. Arvin seconds Hawthorne's characterization of Dimmesdale as having an air as of a being who felt himself quite astray and at a loss in the pathway of human existence and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own (189). On Dimmesdale's chest, the A does not stand for Admirable, much less Aria, but is the symbol of a moral sense gone hopelessly awry (190). And it is the pride of the detached intellect in Chillingworth, and not the wayward passion of the other two, that lies at the root of the whole tragedy (190). Neither detached nor at a loss, Hester makes a world from her imagination and her talent; for her, as for all divas, the world may be unreal, but it is not therefore uninhabitable, since, given expression, it becomes embodied, tangible in its forceful reverberations. To the untrue man, however, as Arvin quotes Hawthorne, the whole universe is false,it is impalpable,it shrinks to nothing within his grasp (190).Arvin worried, not without reason, that he was closer to Roger and Arthur than to Hester. And seeing loss and detachment in himself, he recognized them in Hawthorne, who, like Arvin, lived for long periods a secluded, lonely, frustrated life, cut off from the pleasures of society and his own body. Hawthorne, Arvin saw, lived with a dusky fatalism in the shadow of which all action seemed, or tended to seem, vain and pointless, and the will became the victim of a deadly creeping paralysis (65). Alone in his third-floor apartment in Northampton, Arvin, like Hawthorne, inhabited a dismal chamber, a connection Sawyer and Erdman capture in their opera.But perhaps, for Arvin, Hawthorne, too, was an opera queen. Noting Hawthorne's interest in fine arts such as painting and the minor ones such as jewelry and costume, Arvin writes, in a later essay, How more sensuous his temperament was than it outwardly appeared to be (Hawthorne's Tales 91). When he first contemplated writing The Scarlet Letter, Arvin tells us in Hawthorne, the author, demoralized as he was by losing his post at the customhouse, could make nothing, for the moment, of the dark and distant realities that wavered in the gleam of the scarlet letter (154). But he was always able to find a fictitious world in which to take refuge from the here and now (Hawthorne 11), a world like the theater made for entertaining angelsfallen angels, if you willwhose presence was intolerant of boredom (37). Despite his writer's block, therefore, Hawthorne could write to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I must confess, it stirs up a little of the devil within me, to find myself hunted by these political bloodhounds. If they succeed in getting me out of office, I will surely immolate one or two of them (155). Was it the contemplation of Hester's refused confession that prompted Hawthorne's own confession to Longfellow and put fire in his prose? Arvin suggests as much, referring to Hawthorne's characterization of The Scarlet Letter as a book full of hell-fire. Asking, [H]ow can we doubt that The Scarlet Letter itself had drawn heavily upon that emotion and heightened it with its own imaginative vitality? (158), Arvin implies that, in writing The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne, like his diva heroine, was to pass through what he called the darkest hour I ever lived (156) to arrive in a world suspended between the actual and the marvelous. That's Hester's domain, as Arvin insinuates when he quotes Hawthorne's claim that the scarlet letter had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself (188).The genius of Erdman and Sawyer's opera is its inclusion of Hester Prynne as a character representing imagination as a resistance to shame. The opera adeptly captures the pull that Hester had on Arvinas she had had on Hawthorneand the resources she offered at both men's worst moments (We must use our greatest human gift, Arvin sings in the opera, our imagination, to escape into literature's evergreen groves, a place more joyous, a place less dismal). Because she is a diva, Hester has the affective force, the creative virtuosity, and the unyielding perseverance required to bring unforeseen worlds into being. Reading The Scarlet Letter, Arvin felt the admiration, the respect, the love, of the diva's undeterrable fan. Because he knew a diva when he saw oneand because he knew that divas are anything but trivial, that there is nothing more powerful, as the comedian Hannah Gatsby says, than a broken woman put back togetherArvin shaped, nurtured, and enhanced a commitment to literature's imaginative power.But Hester, despite her dramatic presence, is not the diva of The Scarlet Professor. That role goes to Smith College professor Helen Bacon, Arvin's friend and colleague, capable of empathy and strongmindedness, who imagines a world where chains fall off, emancipation arrives triumphantly, and Arvin at last can be himself. Helen Bacon shares Hester's world-making imagination, but she brings it, as it were, from the stage to the street, demonstrating in the process the relationship between imagination and social action. In designating Helen, not Hester, the diva, Erdman and Sawyer make an important point about freedom: when it comes, it will come through collective effort, not in solitude, and through real acts of defiance (Take a stand, when you take the stand, Bacon sings to Arvin), not merely through the imagining of better worlds. This is a diva with her feet on the ground, and perhaps if Arvin had listened to her as well as he had to Hester, the final curtain on Arvin's life might have fallenas it does in The Scarlet Professor operaon a more inspiring note.It's important that Helen Bacon was a scholar as well as Arvin's friend. Perhaps that is why Erdman and Sawyer made her their opera's diva. As a man, Arvin may have been Bacon's opposite (she and Ned Spofford sing to him, [O]ur world's not one of hopeless romantics, scarlet letters, anguished souls, tragic endings, and the lot. Our world's more stoic, courageous, and direct). But as a critic, he was not. Together Bacon as diva and Arvin as opera queen are not opposites, but one another's necessary complements. She can sing of breaking chains because he, showing in his criticism the relationship among imagination, vision, and transformation, hasto overtax a metaphorset the stage. Heart-stopping aesthetic transcendence and world-changing visions for social change have this in common: they exist as expectation before they come into being as experience. No historical movement for justice has occurred without a prior vision, a world-making imagining of what a better world would look like. In this sense, the imagination that Arvin celebrated in his scholarship is not trivial; it is what makes social activism possible (as Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said, I have a dream). Vision comes, not from observing it in actuality, but from imagining ideals of justice and humanity that, although they may be ultimately unrealizable as pure ideals, are sources of inspiration, bravery, and resilience. That is a heavier task than imagination is typically assigned, but Arvin turned to authors of the American Renaissance for exactly that transformative imagination (It changed my world, your book on Hawthorne, Ned Spofford sings, every page, new inspiration). Arvin saw in the writings of Hawthorne and Melville a faith that human connectedness, compassion, and forgivenessloveare possible only when writersand readersbelieve they are. Connecting the literary imagination with transformative visions of a more humane collective life, Arvin shows throughout his scholarship that, without visions, unseen and unattainable but still worth striving for, there are no breaking chains.To think of Arvin as an opera queen is to acknowledge the accomplishment of The Scarlet Professor in bringing Arvin to life as a person whose interiority comprises, among other traits, pleasure, empathy, a man who, like all opera queens, desires to share the stage with the diva because of all she represents and inspires. We owe a debt to The Scarlet Professor (both Erdman and Sawyer's opera and Barry Werth's biography on which it is based) for keeping Arvin alive for us. His tragic end is a reminder, as important now as it was then, of the violence the state can inflict on bodies and their desires.It would be a mistake, Arvin wrote in his 1929 The Relevance of Hawthorne, to view Hester Prynne as exceptional, eccentric, even unique (61). Arvin teaches us, instead, to see her as a response to American culture writ large, both in Hawthorne's day and in his own. The atomizing, decentralizing, centrifugal tendencies of that culture, Arvin writes, are irreconcilable with a right human solidarity of human and abundant life (64). Hawthorne, for Arvin, depicted critically all those expressions of self-seeking and inhumane pride that have hindered Americans from achieving creative integrity as a people (67) and generated the spiritual isolation in which Americans on many levels have preferred to live rather than lend themselves to a general and articulated purpose. Without such a purpose, American life has failed on the whole to produce rich and complete personalities, men and women who touch life at many points and fulfill more than one or two of its possibilities (68). Turning Hawthorne's masterpiece theatrical, Arvin asks, Who can doubt that The Scarlet Letter is, in this sense, and even if it were no more, the dramatization of many a contemporary tragedy? (69).Arvin's description of American society might well resonate with us today (How did one man's imagination foretell our troubled world? Arvin sings in The Scarlet Professor). Not since the early decades of the Cold War has the future of the globe seemed more in jeopardy, have political and cultural differences so divided society, has an immoral government so destroyed faith in democratic governance, and has the dismissal of the humanities and the arts made free thought so trivial. In such times, opera might seem a risibly inadequate response.But Arvin, I think, would have disagreed, precisely because he saw that Hawthorne, unlike those united only in their collective estrangement from the main body of human experience (Hawthorne 204), was a visionary who knew that human progress is impossible except in the capacities that equalize instead of dividing men, in the affections that draw them together, in imaginative sympathy and the sense of a common brotherhood in error and suffering (Hawthorne's Tales 96). Those terms with which Arvin praised Hawthorne might also be said to characterize opera, with its ability to unify through shared affect and appreciation, to evoke sympathy for the wronged and suffering, and to demonstrate the magnitude of art's capacity to exaggerate and hence make visible the flaws and possibilities of our lives outside the theater. In his fiction, Hawthorne captured and valued those operatic qualities, and Arvin, watching him do so, felt the appreciative, even devoted, connection that led him to write so powerfully about Hester and her diva powers.For our part, watching Arvin in opera, we have choices: to identify with human failures or to judge, to appreciate imaginative vision or to roll our eyes, to be an opera queen or not. Before deciding, consider Tony Kushner's claim for the symbolic importance of opera: The Master's Voice is strict and sure and clear, it doesn't falter, it sounds like Nature, we know His tune because we hear it over and over, and everyone is taught to sing along. The opera or perhaps I should write the operatic, is a home, one home, of the human, is home to everything else. (5)