The Most

Dangerous Homosexuals

by DAN ALLEN

When I tried to tell my American literature class about the prevalence of homosexuality in our movies and literature, some members of the class balked. They claimed they didn't know what I was talking about, and they hinted that even I didn't know of what I spoke

"Aw, shucks," I said, "maybe you're right."

Of course they weren't. But life is very difficult for college students today. So who was I to add the burden of facing the idea that there is a dangerous homosexuality in America that will overthrow the whole damned country if we don't apprehend, limit, and understand it? Who was I indeed?

To see a glamorous version of the homo sexuality I speak of, one can look at the love affair between Robert Redford and Paul Newman as it unfolds on the silver screen. Notice its transcending hypocrisy. One doesn't have to go all the way back to queer relationships between ostensibly straight males in Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper, as Leslie Fiedler does.

Fiedler, with all his misdirected machismo did at least admit that Jim says, "Come back to the raft, Huck, honey." No other critic had ever faced up to that; in their male faculty atmospheres they dared not rock the boat. As long as they could blow each other (literally and metaphorically) and blow well-hung male graduate students in private and keep wearing the badges of wife and family to keep their image of maleness secure in Academia, all was well with the world.

This homosexuality I speak of exists in those areas of our life where people of the

same sex congregate and exclude the opposite sex. Further, as I've suggested, it is a society based on hypocrisy. It is the completely male society seen in the business, military, industrial, and education world, a society in which honesty of emotions and

sexuality are suspect and feared.

Hypocrisy comes through the imperative that all members of these homosexual (same-sex) groups act out a gross masculinity, which is a distortion of the Hemingway code, a code that even Hem. ingway saw was sham. And how Hemingway must have suffered because he felt he had to live under the stringent requirements of that code that does not allow humanity to man or to woman. It is obvious that he suffered; he did blow his brains out, didn't he?

Though Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner threatens to become the guidebook for liberated gays, there is this dangerous homosexuality present in her book, too. All of the characters in her novel put a premium on masculinity. Androgyny? Forget it. (Moreover, the book endorses monogamy, still relies on the death of gays, and glorifies good old American religion.)

New York literary gossip has it that Warren lied; she didn't get the idea for her novel from talking with a young male track star who was gay, but she first wrote it as a lesbian book. That scared the pants off her, since it didn't fit in with the code. So she rewrote, adding a few drops of amyl.

Since Warren obviously made her choice, I wonder whether she can't be recognized as what she is, a revisionist sow. However, as an older gay male, I have to admit that Warren did a lot for me. She got me to running, and also she has set up a mystique that makes me have to fight off young jocks who see me as the coach while they, in their wire-rimmed glasses and sweatbands, are acting out Billy Sive.

Marvelous. All of us need some drama in our lives, and they can pursue older men without guilt feelings about dad complexes, while I can enjoy being pursued. Yes, it's marvelous, but at the same time all of us ought to note the travesty we're involved in. We're continuing to stay locked in a code, masculinity uber alles, while running around the track of our nervous fantasy world. Anyway, who says that young jocks turn me on?

There is rampant homosexuality, galloping same-sexism, in board rooms,

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