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Chapter One
James Dean and the
Fantasy of Rebellion
Four book-length biographies of James Dean were published in 1974 and 1975, along with a rash of articles commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the star's death. By this time, the life story of the deceased star had already been extensively recirculated in various other forms: "one-shot" publications, series of articles in popular fan magazines, exposes in scandal magazines, biopics, and at least two other book-length biographical studies. What is particularly distinctive about this mid-1970s work is that it centered on the matter of how to determine the "truth" of the star's sexuality. Grappling with "evidence" that ranged from Dean's sexual involvement with a noted network television producer to his reputed appearance in a porno film to the pleasure of having cigarettes extinguished on his flesh in S&M bars, the 1970s biographers repeatedly asked: Was James Dean gay?
Their answers conflicted. Conceding that Dean had had sex with gay men, some argued that he did so only for survival early in his career; others posited that the star's acts marked him as bisexual. A third group asserted that Dean was incontestably and exclusively gay. A salient feature of this debate was the extent to which evidence of the star's homosexual acts necessarily constituted a homosexual identity. The debate took place in the first public forum about male sexuality in a Hollywood star in which the voices of self-identified gay men (as well as men who openly acknowledged that they had engaged in homosexual acts, but refrained from identifying themselves as gay) provided themselves with an opportunity to speak and be heard.
Conducted approximately five years after the Stonewall incident in 1969, this public negotiation of a deceased star's sexuality drew its rhetoric from a gay liberation movement in which, as John d'Emilio suggests, "coming out" had begun to be considered as an act of personal affirmation as well as political responsibility. The emergence of the "homosexual Dean" thus coincided historically with the public emergence of a subculture that had become eminently more visible and vocal by the mid-1970s than it had been twenty years earlier during Dean's brief career as a film actor. Yet the potential for gay male spectators to affiliate this star with homosexual practice or identity had existed since the mid-1950s. The fact that such an affiliation was not widely documented in the 1950s, but became prevalent by the 1970s attests to a set of shifting power relations in the public discourse of homosexuality during this span of more than twenty years. In examining the historical reception of a popular male actor working in the Hollywood studio system, the power relations of homosexual discourse are inextricably linked to another shifting set of differential power relations in star discourse. In this set of relations, the ways that audiences receive, interpret, and appropriate the sexuality of star images--in narrative and non-narrative forms--involves the ways in which various agencies authorize the representation of sexuality.
The present chapter elucidates the ways in which social, legal, and political agencies regulated the discourse of homosexuality in the 1950s, the Hollywood film industry's response to this system of regulation, and the strategies that gay men used to intervene in the constructions of personal, social, and sexual identity that were imposed on them. By relating the extratextual discourse of rebellion to the fantasy operations that became accessible to gay men in their relations to Hollywood stars, and evaluating James Dean's three primary film roles in terms of these fantasy operations, I show how queer readings of Dean emerge as imaginable reception strategies as early as the 1950s, while the star persona continued to resonate as an accessible and highly popular figure for self-defined heterosexual audiences. Chapter 2 then proceeds to examine the development of these reception strategies over time, tracing the complex historical emergence of the homosexual Dean.
In a 1957 article for New Republic , Sam Astrachan analyzes the appeal of two of the most prominent members of "The New Lost Generation," Marion Brando and James Dean. Whereas Astrachan reveals a certain scorn and disdain for the aimlessness of both figures, he concedes that he is willing to "sympathize" with Brando, because of both the actor's considerable talents and the moral capacities he demonstrates through his character portrayals. In reference to Brando's role of the alienated, leather-clad, motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One (1954), the author observes that "there is a right and a wrong, and it is only when Brando sees that he has been wrong that there is any hope for him." The widespread appeal of Dean's onscreen and offscreen personas is more disconcerting for Astrachan: "In each of the Dean roles, the distinguishing elements are the absence of his knowing who he is, and what is right and wrong. Dean is always mixed-up and it is this that has made him so susceptible to teen-age adulation.... In James Dean, his movie roles, his life and death, there is a general lack of identity."
The observation that Dean embodies the alienated rebel hero with whom confused adolescents could readily identify is typical of critical evaluations of his persona in the mid-1950s. The more curious and unique aspect of Astrachan's analysis occurs later in the article, when he suggests that Dean's directionlessness is symptomatic of a larger trend of alienated figures in contemporary fiction who demonstrate a similar lack of personal or social commitment. Citing the recent examples of Saul Bellow's Seize the Day , Herbert Gold's The Man Who Was Not With It , and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room , Astrachan observes that "without any change in expression, James Dean could have played Gold's carnival peace-time enlistee, and Baldwin's quasihomosexual (we will leave Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm for the more mature talents of Marlon Brando).... The lack of identity that exists in James Dean also exists in the characters of these three authors. Baldwin, unable to finally commit his character to homosexuality, leaves him on a foreign shore unsure even of his sexual nature" (17). The actor's ability to portray these roles convincingly is thus figured not as a sign of the range of his acting talents, but rather as evidence of a homology between Dean the biographical figure and the characters of the novels: in both cases, there is a troubling indeterminacy of character and the lack of a core identity. Moreover, committing oneself to a distinctive social and sexual identity becomes a personal and social responsibility well within the range of Dean's capacities, and the social malaise that Astrachan attempts to derive from the case study stems from the star's active refusal to assume this responsibility--a refusal that the author perceives as all too convenient and prevalent in contemporary culture.
Certainly, Astrachan's comments here fall short of suggesting or attempting to confirm James Dean's homosexual tendencies. Such overt deliberations of the star's sexuality would not be conducted for several years after his death. Astrachan's comments are nonetheless revealing since they show that even in the years shortly after Dean's death, his star persona already harbors an indeterminacy that extends to the realm of sexual orientation. Astrachan also establishes a connection between social and cultural discourses regarding two prominent social "problems" of the 1950s--homosexuality and the alienation and rebellion of youth, configured as "juvenile delinquency"--through recourse to the concept of identity. This connection becomes crucial in the representation of the star's sexuality, in light of contemporary discourses of rebellion and delinquency informing each of Dean's three major film roles, most evidently in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), but also in East of Eden (1955) and Giant (1956).
Homosexuality and Juvenile Delinquency
Although many of the 1970s biographers considered it incontestable and self-evident that James Dean was homosexual, it is difficult to find documented evidence of the star's homosexual orientation in texts of the 1950s, and even more difficult to locate evidence that men who perceived themselves as homosexual in the 1950s also perceived Dean as homosexual. This difficulty does not, however, suggest that the conjectures and assertions of the 1970s biographers were ill-founded or fabricated, nor does the lack of evidence of Dean's historical reception as gay in the 1950s prove conclusively that spectators at this time did not perceive him as gay. Rather, these difficulties point to significant differences in the discursive tools available in American culture in two distinct historical periods--tools that impose limitations upon how a historically specific culture imagines itself, and how individuals are invited to imagine and define themselves within that culture. As Janet Staiger suggests, these limitations manifest themselves as power struggles, cultural contestations over the meaning of the "sign" of homosexuality, how this sign may be circulated in public discourse, and who may appropriate this sign for what purposes.
An examination of the public circulation of the sign of homosexuality in the 1950s demonstrates the workings of this struggle and identities the agents who assumed the power to regulate how homosexuality could be imagined by individuals in culture. To a significant extent, it reveals a consensus perspective of homosexuality as a pathology that posed a threat to the integrity of the nuclear family as well as the nation as a whole. At the same time, however, the examination demonstrates one manifestation of Foucault's assertion that, in discursive operations, "where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power." In the context of the 1950s, this resistance stems from a curious overlapping of discourses: homosexuality shared common discursive features with juvenile delinquency, a social problem that arose from public concern over the presence of a teen culture that had been emerging since World War II. While the dominant ideology used this discursive similarity in an effort to contain the proliferation of both social problems, the overlapping of discourses also provided seemingly disempowered homosexuals with the means to imagine themselves and to construct their own identities in nonpathological terms. They did so by adopting and appropriating a term that was widely used to describe the activity of juvenile delinquents, "rebellion," and adapting this term to the particular circumstances of their own social oppression.
The emergence of homosexuality and juvenile delinquency as prominent issues in the 1950s can be traced to social and cultural changes brought about by World War II. Psychiatric explanations of homosexuality had been prevalent in the United States since the 1920s, as Freudian psychoanalytic discourse progressively infiltrated mainstream American culture. In the war years, however, the military actively sought to detect aberrant and deviant behavior through screening procedures for inductees. At the same time, the enforced isolation and segregation of the population by gender "created substantially new erotic opportunities that promoted the articulation of a gay identity and the rapid growth of a gay subculture." Released in 1948, Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male also profoundly affected subsequent efforts of gay subcultural communities to be socially recognized and tolerated. On the basis of interviews conducted with thousands of Americans of varying socioeconomic status, age, vocation, and religious affiliation, the report concluded that one of eight American males had experienced sustained homosexual erotic tendencies for at least three years, and among males he "found that 50 percent admitted erotic responses to their own sex." Likewise, Kinsey found that many individuals with past homosexual experiences later led exclusively heterosexual lifestyles; thus, homosexuality became not only a more common phenomenon but also a fluid rather than a stable identity. The report both confounded and exacerbated attempts to appeal to medical discourse in defining the homosexual as pathological, especially since it suggested that homosexuality was undetectable by human physiognomy. Paradoxically, as Robert Corber suggests, conservative ideologies had substantial interests in restabilizing homosexuality as a category of identity, and by continuing to maintain that homosexuality was an identifiable psychological aberrance, the root of the "problem" continued to be the individual who failed to adjust to sexual norms, and not the culture or society who oppressed the individual.
These conservative efforts justified the State Department's actions in 1950 when it declared that homosexuals were unsuitable for government employment because of potential susceptibility to blackmail threats. Investigations resulted in hundreds of suspected homosexuals losing their jobs. Moreover, in the context of the Cold War hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s, the homosexual was determined to be further unfit for government service not just because of his lack of emotional stability, but also because his behavior revealed a weakness of character at a time when it was deemed crucial to maintain a "moral fiber" strong enough to ward off corrupting external political influences. The inherent problem of developing a reliable method for detecting homosexuality was resolved by a curious displacement of personal onto political behavior: "If an individual's sexual orientation could no longer be determined by her/his lack of conformity to the norms of male and female behavior, then it could be by her/his politics." The homosexual was conveniently labeled as dangerous in the face of communism, desperate as he was to conceal a sexual identity that carried with it a damaging social stigma and an inherent weakness of character.
As is the case with homosexuality, increased national attention to the problem of juvenile delinquency is traceable to the war experience. If enforced gender segregation of adult men and women fostered the establishment of homosexual communities during the war, it also resulted in more adolescents entering the workforce while attending high school. As James Gilbert suggests, this phenomenon initiated a trend of "adolescent consumerism" in which teenagers began to constitute a targetable market sector for the advertising industry. Premature consumers also threatened the structure of the nuclear family because of their emerging financial independence from their parents. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, rising discretionary income among adolescents helped to generate teenage subcultures shaped according to discrete gender divisions: hot rods for boys, and teen magazines for girls.
If the crisis over homosexuality in the late 1940s in large part resulted from a report that made homosexual behavior and identity more opaque (and thus more threatening), the increase in juvenile delinquency was ostensibly easier to detect through crime statistics. The delinquency phenomenon also resulted in increased government jobs, through the formation in 1947 of two governmental committees assembled to manage and contain the problem: the Continuing Committee on the Prevention and Control of Delinquency (CCPCD), which stressed the importance of action at the local level; and the Children's Bureau, which relied on the testimony of "experts" and centered on social work services. Both new committees spurred national attention to the issue. Gilbert explains that while statistical reports failed to establish sufficient reliability to indicate a progressive increase in delinquency in the postwar period, what certainly did increase both through the trend of quantification and the committee activities was the degree of discourse surrounding the problem. This increase resulted in new classifications of adolescent behavior by experts, redefinitions of juvenile delinquency, attempts to contain and redirect youthful energy toward more productive activities, and anxiety regarding the inability to isolate causes or effects of the problem.
In the 1950s, then, the problem of isolating, containing, and defining the still ambiguous categories of homosexuality and juvenile delinquency resulted in more widespread concern over the proliferation of both phenomena, and the dispersal of descriptions within each of these categories parallels the fear that the phenomena would themselves proliferate among individuals. Pathological discourse thus became an appropriate vehicle for the expression of this proliferation, and both homosexuality and juvenile delinquency were described through metaphors of infection and contagion--metaphors that were used similarly to incite public concern over the spreading of the communist menace. The Kinsey Report induced paranoia by demonstrating the ubiquity of the homosexual: if anyone in the crowd could now be gay (or might become gay later in life), then it followed that homosexuality might proliferate by recruitment: "Homosexuality became an epidemic infecting the nation, actively spread by communists to sap the strength of the next generation." The Senate Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments warned that "these perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices. This is particularly true in the case of young and impressionable people who might come under the influence of a pervert.... One homosexual can pollute a Government office." In the discourse of juvenile delinquency, "the predominant metaphor was one of contagion, contamination, and infection," similar to descriptions of other phenomena in the 1950s that were characterized by an "invasion from the outside." National attention was focused on the potential corruptibility of impressionable adolescents, whose sense of morality was still under development, and who were thus thought to be more susceptible to suggestion and conversion.
If uncertainties regarding the indeterminate causes and effects of homosexuality and juvenile delinquency resulted in descriptions of the phenomena as diseases propagated by communism, the public concern over matters of causality also located the domestic environment as the origin of a cure for both problems. According to Elaine Tyler May, "Many contemporaries believed that the Russians could destroy the United States not only by atomic attack but through internal subversion. In either case, the nation had to be on moral alert ... [and] many postwar experts ... prescribed family stability as an antidote to these related dangers." The stable family capable of providing a haven and source of protection required the persistent moral influence of both parents in the home, as well as a strict division of gender roles between parents. Both of these prerequisites to stability had been threatened since the war years, when fathers were away overseas while mothers worked in factories and offices. The ideal parental role models of the postwar era appeared to be the father who functioned as breadwinner and the mother who resumed her role as family caregiver. While the father's return to a position of control in the family was a necessary demonstration of his own masculinity, a 1958 article in Look warned that fathers who worked too much or too hard would necessarily fail to provide their male children sufficient exposure to the ideal male role model: "A boy growing up ... has little chance to observe his father in strictly masculine pursuits." And the mother's failure to observe the distinction between giving too much and too little attention to her children could have disastrous consequences. As May explains, "Mothers who neglected their children bred criminals, mothers who overindulged their sons turned them into passive, weak, effeminite [ sic ] `perverts.' Sons bred in such homes, according to psychologists and psychoanalysts, would find it difficult to form `normal' relationships with women." Clearly, the 1950s mother assumed the more crucial parental role for ensuring that the child would avoid the deviant paths of juvenile delinquency or homosexuality. In the often blatantly mysogynist discourse of gender roles of husband and wife, the female was also held responsible for the pressures that her spouse was forced to endure in order to maintain an ideal masculinity associated with earning power and sexual potency.
In the monogamous heterosexual relationship, both the male and female were expected to conform to their respective gender roles. By emphasizing both the adult male's greater susceptibility to the demands of his female partner and the son's dependence on his mother to ensure stable masculinity, however, dominant cultural discourses empathized more strongly with the male's plight. Early marriage was a requirement for the proper containment and expression of the sexual impulse, and the requisite demonstration of masculine maturity, according to Barbara Ehrenreich, was to marry by the average age of twenty-three: "If adult masculinity was indistinguishable from the breadwinner role, then it followed that the man who failed to achieve this role was either not fully adult or not fully masculine. In the schema of male pathology developed by mid-century psychologists, immaturity shaded into infantilism, which was, in turn, a manifestation of unnatural fixation on the mother, and the entire complex of symptomatology reached its clinical climax in the diagnosis of homosexuality." Reinforcing the equation of maturity with an acceptance of the role of responsible husband, the fear of being tainted homosexual presented the greatest incentive for husbands not to leave their wives: "Homosexuality ... was the ultimate escapism." Still, it remained the responsibility of the wife not to become so "dominating" or sexually demanding that the husband might find cause to consider such an escape.
It is through a system of categorical oppositions and equations that juvenile delinquency was ultimately associated with homosexuality in the failed domestic environment. Males developed their maturity through the appropriate childrearing practices of their mothers, so that they could eventually integrate socially and assume their proper roles in the domestic sphere as breadwinner husbands. Children who were either overindulged or undersupervised by their mothers would fail to perform this requisite social integration. They might become homosexual, but even if they did not, they remained isolated and socially alienated figures, "loners" who rebelled against the commitments expected of them. Even if they committed no crimes, their antisocial behavior provided sufficient cause to label them delinquents, until they grew older and could assume other social stigmas.
The tensions and contradictions between conformity and individuality, and between rebellion and social integration, are already evident in nationalist public discourse in the postwar era. As James Gilbert explains, in the late 1940s the National Delinquency Prevention Society emphasized the message that, provided with sufficient means of organization, antisocial juvenile delinquents could rapidly evolve into a threatening totalitarian force in the United States. In The Vital Center , a 1949 study of communist conspiracy, Arthur Schlesinger blames the individual's social isolation and alienation for his/her decision to join the Communist party; by suggesting that those who have no sense of place in the prevailing social structure are the most susceptible converts to totalitarianism, Schlesinger conflates political affiliation with human psychology and identity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom by Michael DeAngelis. Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
