James W. Fugaté, actually. He wrote about gay material in an era when many people who did so used a pseudonym (Gore Vidal had a sufficiently exalted social position and Truman Capote didn't really care). This novel, Quatrefoil (1950), was unusual because the characters he created were men who liked men. It's a war novel, as you'd probably expect. The war is winding down, and the Navy is at the point of cleaning up loose ends that men are being transferred to shore duty. Things happen.
I have to tell you a research story before I discuss the book, though. I found Quatrefoil while I was researching the paper I presented at the Harry Hay Centennial in New York last September. The one where my major discovery turned out to be that a quarter of the gay bars and restaurants in Los Angeles were in the San Fernando Valley, where I live now, and that in the books people have written about gay life in Los Angeles during the 1950s there is NOTHING on the San Fernando Valley. Nothing. In the real world I have my marching papers, but for this essay, I first have to introduce you to my main source on the period, the de facto historian Jim Kepner.
Follow me below the great orange armband for a discussion of a fascinating novel and two fascinating people from the 1950s.
What we know about gay life in Los Angeles during the 1950s we know because of Jim Kepner (1923-1997).
Kepner began to collect material about homosexuality in the 1940s (no, I don't know how he managed to stay out of the war), and the material he collected became the Interenational Gay and Lesbian Archives, which has now been merged with the ONE Institute, administered by the University of Southern California. That's where I did all the primary research for the paper. In a manuscript titled
My First 73 Years of Gay Liberation, Kepner reports having read
Quatrefoil in 1951, before he started thinking about forming a magazine to discuss issues that affected gay men; the magazine, called
ONE , was founded after October 15, 1952. Kepner edited it and wrote most of the material, using pseudonyms not to hide his identity but to disguise the fact that he didn't have many writers on staff.
One of the people Kepner solicited to write for ONE was indeed James Barr. Barr had come to Los Angeles to write screenplays but he was called up for the Korean War and stationed in Alaska. To get out of this, Barr outed himself as the author of Quatrefoil. This is Barr with his woozle.
He write a collection of short stories (
Derricks [1951) and in the winter of 1953 went back to live with his family in Kansas while he contributed stories and articles to
ONE. In an incident that now strikes me as very familiar to the Daily Kos community, he left Great Bend, Kansas on August 13 1954 to travel to Los Angeles by train, where he spent a weekend with Jim Kepner and the other people associated with
ONE, returning August 17. In the carton of Barr/Fugaté material at the ONE archives, there is a diary in which Barr says about the trip,
I didn't know homosexuals could be so admirable.
And that leads us to a discussion of
Quatrefoil. Yes, it's 1950, two years after the publication of Alfred Kinsey's
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The crackdown on homosexuals in the federal government was just beginning but it had started already in the armed forces. Barr wants to make sure that there isn't a trace of effeminacy in any of his characters so they can function in the Navy without anyone asking any questions. There's a lot of "code" in the book, which shouldn't be surprising.
At any rate, it's 1946. Ensign Philip Froelich is being separated from his ship in preparation for a court martial for insubordination (justifiable but still against regulations) in Seattle. He expects to take a bus there, but that doesn't happen, and an older man in the coffee shop at the bus station suggests he's going to Seattle too and invites Froelich to ride along. They discuss Proust and Gide and Oscar Wilde on the ride, which I suppose is a way of saying "I am" or at least "I'm well-read." As he gets out of the car at the base, Froelich realizes that the driver is in uniform and his insignia indicate that the driver is a lieutenant commander, who he discussed Oscar Wilde with.
Okay. We start preparing for the court-martial with a fairly unpleasant lieutenant, Bruner. Then, we're all at the Officer's club, when the lieutenant commander shows up and recognizes Froehlich, and the introductions identify him as Tim. That's actually Timothy Danelaw, the heir to a brewing fortune. We learn that Froelich's fiancee, Sybel Jo and her mother, self-termed Madame Voth, are arriving in Seattle from Oklahoma, and then Froelich ends up in the hospital and Tim shows up to comfort him. It gets messy and complicated. Danelaw is married, but it's a marriage of convenience, and Mrs. Danelaw recognizes Froelich as her rival. It turns out that Froelich had a homosexual incident with a sailor on the ship he has been separated from. Danelaw is a painter, and he wants to paint a portrait of Froelich, and Froelich acquiesces.
During the sessions, they discuss life, and Tim confesses his love for Philip (actually, he says "Je t'adore"), and then this:
"What can a man know of admiration for another man? I want your friendship and your respect but not that -- Philip's voice caught in his throat -- "because it is indecent, and ugly, and diseased, and perverted."
The lad, of course, protesteth too much. Tim understands he's confused, but when they go back to the house the Danelaws are renting for the duration, Tim realizes he left his studio door unlocked and open and there's a painting of Philip that Philip thinks is of him as the Antichrist. Incidentally, Danelaw gets the court-martial called off.
THEN the two men go to a navy meeting with the Admiral in San Francisco, and, as so often happens in San Francisco
"Are you afraid, Philip"
"Very afraid," he whispered.
and we know "it" happened. And then we're in part 2, which takes place in Devereux, Oklahoma, a town Philip's grandfather founded along with its first bank. BUT not before an almost Feydeau-ish if it weren't such a, well, sad series of events. Philip has morning-after remorse, turns up in Seattle unshaved and unkempt, and Tim's ensign, Mike Mallory, gives him the what-for and tells him he saw it coming, taking Tim's side. Philip decides to marry Sybel Jo instanter after this exchange with Mike
"I'm no homosexual," Philip said defensively.
"Oh yeah? You might fool some of your hick friends . . but you haven't fooled Tim, Bruner, or me. Every guy has some of it sometime. If it happens when he's twelve and he gets over it, he's called normal. At any other time, he gets another name, depending on who's doing the calling, That's all, chum. Now go call your Southern belle -- or go to Tim and give him a chance to handle Bruner in his own way and, incidentally, to restore his faith in you."
But Philip and Sybel Jo have to go to the Danelaws' house and Philip has another idea (apparently he's figured out that maybe he IS) because Madame Voth apparently overheard a conversation he and Tim were having. To cut a long story short, Philip takes the train to Oklahoma, and Tim, after three days in DC, decides to join him there, at the family home, at the invitation of Philip's mother. Naturally, Tim's sister figures everything out and decides Tim is better for her brother than Sybel Jo would be, so all that has to happen is for Philip to figure things out himself.
He does, finally, especially after he realizes that Grandfather Devereux left the man Philip called Uncle Felix a third of the bank because they were fond of each other in that way, but in 1920 that was impossible. Philip and Tim go back to Seattle, where Philip is separating from the Navy with an honorable discharge. Tim has to go to San Francisco for a day, and then, their whole life will be ahead of them. Only it's 1946 in the book, and 1950 in the writing. I didn't see it coming, but Tim's plane crashes, killing everyone aboard. The good news is that Philip decides not to walk into the ocean and drown himself:
He had found the one thing that was more powerful than death -- love. Death was not strong enough to claim him without conquest . . .
Barr writes very well, and I've left out a lot of the detail. His description of Devereux, Oklahoma (which we know is due south of Tulsa) and the Froelich family and the family home (they're rich too) are worth reading the book for as a piece of social history. When Roger Austen assessed the book in his 1977 monograph,
Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (old joke: a novel that sleeps with other novels?) he went after the "lofty intellectualism" of the thoughtful, masculine heroes, "vastly superior to the average homosexual" and suggested that the book should be appreciated in sociological rather than in literary terms. I'm glad I read it.
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule
11:55 AM PT: I'm leaving for my Tuesday classes now, and I'm not going to be back until probably 1:30 AM Eastern, so consider this a discussion of literature written about gay men.