A Queer History of the United States (20 page)

Religious tracts such as these were popular because they were a cunning mixture of the devotional, the instructional, and the titillating. They were not, however, the only popular genre that told boys how to become real men. Mass-marketed literature with engaging, adventure-filled narratives describing idealized masculinity were also popular.

One of the most salient, and durable, manifestations—one that was to become pervasive in popular culture—began with the publication of
Tarzan of the Apes
in 1912. American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan, a British Lord who, abandoned in the African jungle as an infant, is raised by apes and becomes “lord of the jungle.” Burroughs wrote over two dozen Tarzan novels and avidly allowed the character to appear in newspaper comics, film serializations, and a massive amount of merchandising.

The popularity of the character was striking. He represented the unspoken fantasy of the innate superiority of the white male who was feeling attacked and beleaguered in early twentieth-century culture.
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Burroughs’s novels are replete with scenes that portray Tarzan, by his very nature, triumphing over both apes and Africans, who are often equated with one another and subdued by violence.
Tarzan of the Apes
—published in a year during which African Americans were being lynched at the rate of one every 5.8 days—was a reflection and grisly imitation of American race violence of the time. In one scene, Tarzan, in imitation of white American lynch mobs that murdered African American men to protect the purity of white women and the sanctity of motherhood and home, brutally kills the African Kulonnga, who has murdered Kala, Tarzan’s ape mother: “Hand over hand Tarzan drew the struggling black until he had him hanging by his neck in midair; then Tarzan climbed to a larger branch drawing the still threshing victim well up into the sheltering verdure of the tree.”
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Tarzan continues to lynch Africans throughout the novels. To reinforce strict ideologies of heterosexuality, Tarzan has to kill. When describing Tarzan’s killing habits, Burroughs is quite clear about what makes an ideal man:

He killed for food most often, but being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure, a thing which no other animal does; for it has remained for man alone among all the creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasures of inflicting suffering and death.
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This, certainly, is not what the social purity movement endorsed, but it is close to Roosevelt claiming that “work—fight—breed” were the requisites and qualities of a worthwhile race or nation.

At times the African American man and his “primitive” body were simply demonized as the “black rapist,” a threat to white women, who needed to be saved by the heroic, civilized white man. This is the theme of Merian C. Cooper’s incredibly popular 1933 film
King Kong.
But Tarzan is a more complicated character; his civilized, lordly heritage makes him smart, but his “primitive” jungle training (he continues to believe he is an ape until he meets other white people) makes him strong and manly.

Burroughs’s Tarzan series, twenty-two books in all, was aimed at men and boys. The superior-white-male-in-the-jungle theme continued its extraordinary popularity in a series of twenty books that began in 1926 with
Bomba the Jungle Boy.
The Bomba series was written by various authors under the pseudonym “Roy Rockwood.” These books define the difference between white and nonwhite people by asserting that Bomba, who is white, has a soul that is “awake” in his body, but the souls of his native companions are “sleeping.” This religious rhetoric, which portrays a race-based conversion rooted in the body, is closely related to social purity thought. It also harkens to the ideology of the Boy Scouts, in which religious sentiment can truly reside only in a healthy and clean body. The Scouts, unlike the homoeroticized cowboys of the past century, were connected to nature but were not outlaws; rather, they were civilized, respectable, and admirable white, heterosexual citizens.

Consuming Manliness

Public discussion about American masculinity is, at heart, about bodies. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, moral degeneration, “race suicide,” and the threat of homosexuality needed to be combated by strong, white, male bodies. These decades also saw the rise of an American physical culture movement that promoted a strong, healthy male body, available to any man who would work for it. In tandem with Roosevelt’s personal story of physical transformation and the racialized fantasies of Tarzan, constructing the strong white male body was becoming a consumer industry.

This new commerce in male bodies was started by Eugen Sandow, a Prussian circus strongman who became a London music hall performer in the 1890s. In 1894 he published
Sandow on Physical Training,
a how-to guide for bodybuilding. In 1898 American physical culture and health enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden began publishing
Physical Culture,
a monthly magazine
that would grow into a publishing empire.
Physical Culture
offered instructions for physical exercises and promoted good nutrition, but its main message was warning men against drinking, smoking, gambling, masturbation, and nonprocreative sexual intercourse.

Physical Culture
unashamedly praised the human body. Macfadden even ran into trouble with Anthony Comstock for his posters of women in tights and men in breechcloths.
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The motto of
Physical Culture
was “Weakness Is a Crime. Don’t Be a Criminal.” The magazine discussed health for both women and men, but was obsessed with masculinity. In addition to publishing books such as
Superb Virility of Manhood
(1904), Macfadden marketed devices for enlarging the penis. Throughout the first two decades of the century, he inveighed against homosexuals as well as other perceived social ills. In the 1930s he became an avid anti-Communist and penned editorials such as “Communistic Agitators in Our Schools—Hang the Traitors.”
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This conflation of physical strength, traditional gender roles, heterosexuality, and patriotic manliness solidified a concept of manhood that increasingly seemed to be under attack. Threats included the increasing visibility of the homosexual, a more urban economy that valued masculine strength less than before, and the emergence of the independent woman. In the midst of all this, the country itself was at war. The rise of a military culture during these years—the Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century, the invasion of Mexico in 1914 and 1916, the occupation of Haiti in 1915, and the United States’ entrance into World War I in 1917—contributed to the cult of idealized, heterosexual manhood.

In time, the discussion of masculinity became increasingly sexualized, giving rise to an American visual culture that idolized the exposed, muscular male body as pleasurable in itself. Eroticized images of men appeared in a wide variety of venues: covers and illustrations of books aimed at boys, mainstream advertising art, popular magazines, fine art, and physical culture magazines. For the first time in American consumer culture, the male image, once equated only with toughness, was beginning to be viewed as a sexualized object. Many homosexual artists took advantage of this cultural moment.

Advertising art was one of the first to reflect the shift. The rapid class and social changes that were occurring mandated new forms of dress and deportment. For social and economic mobility, men needed to buy clothing that indicated class or business status. In advertisements and on magazine covers, J. C. Leyendecker’s noted illustrations of young, attractive, middle-class businessmen overtly glorified the male body. Leyendecker, who was openly homosexual, designed the iconic “Arrow Collar Man,” who represented both stalwart masculinity and urban, middle-class upward mobility. Leyendecker’s slightly sleek and prettily dressed office clerk drew on homosexual traditions of the dandy and the fop. The Arrow Collar Man was so enormously popular that even Theodore Roosevelt singled out the image as “a superb example of the common man.” Commentators never mentioned that Leyendecker’s model for the Arrow Collar Man was his lover, Charles Beach, with whom he openly lived and socialized.

Another homosexual artist of this era was Paul Cadmus, who often worked on government commissions from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). His raucous, sexualized images of obvious homosociality, including murals such as
The Fleet’s In!
(1933) and
YMCA Locker Room
(1933) and etchings such as
Two Boys on a Beach
(1938), are considered important contributions to American pictorial art.
The Fleet’s In!
prompted complaints from the Navy and the public on the grounds that it gave a negative image of men in the armed forces. Ironically, even though the mural features a clearly homosexual character and interactions, critics more often complained about the female prostitutes.

Consumerism for women also became culturally sexualized. The rise of the department store, with its beautifully arranged, and often erotically enticing, displays of luxury clothing and accessories for women, signaled a shift in how the average shopper thought about the acts of looking and buying. The pervasiveness of this new consumer mentality affected the economy as well as basic structures of sexuality and gender in everyday living. Women’s clothing (and even lingerie), once piled on or behind counters, was now beautifully displayed behind large picture windows for the sidewalk public. In the first two decades of the century, women’s groups, reflecting the sentiments of the social purity movement, routinely protested such displays. Some cities saw disturbances caused by men gathering outside department store windows. These shockingly new displays of public sexuality were common in almost all American cities.
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By the 1920s and 1930s, the art of window design and display was spearheaded by homosexual men who, like Leyendecker, drew on a tradition of homosexual aesthetics to promote this wave of consumerism. Vincente Minnelli, who had relationships with women and men and later became a noted Hollywood film director, got his start as a window designer in Chicago. The role of the female consumer also became more and more important as women gained more access to money, either earned or through their husbands.

In the popular imagination and advertising, consumption was continually linked to personal worth: the more money you had, the more you could consume, thus making you a better person. Consumer goods sold to women to enhance their attractiveness—lingerie, dresses, cosmetics, and luxury items such as furs, gowns, and expensive jewelry—enhanced their social status. But they also reflected on the women’s status, within their heterosexual relationships, as consumer goods themselves. In a clear critique of heterosexual relationships, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen suggested in his 1899
Theory of the Leisure Class
that the ownership of valuable material objects is indistinguishable from the ownership of women, especially “in a predatory society.”
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Men during this time were faced with a consumption culture that generated mixed messages. Class mobility was easier for single men, since they did not have to support a family and thus had the disposable income and leisure time to engage in activities that were indicative of a high-class status. Conversely, as Veblen proposed, male consumption was innately tied to heterosexuality. The acquisition of a wife was an essential aspect, if not
the
essential aspect, of American manhood. Due to the rise of what Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” (the purchasing of goods to gain class status), heterosexuality, gender roles, and class status were all costumed performances, and all acquisitions, including wives, were essentially disposable.

The new commodified, ostentatious definitions of masculinity and femininity—partly designed by homosexuals—changed the appearance of American culture, including religion. Americans had embraced conspicuous consumption, spectacle, and the sexuality of the Arrow Collar Man and luxurious woman. The next step was religion sold as entertainment. These decades saw a rise in populist religious figures who preached a distinctly American, heterosexual gospel. The American public responded with enthusiasm. The new technology of radio enabled these preachers to build huge, devoted followings.

Two of the most popular evangelists—they each preached to millions of people in their careers—were Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson. Each had distinct effects on how Americans conceptualized the links between sexuality, gender, and religion. Sunday, a former baseball player, was an athletic man—yet dapper in conservative, well-made suits—who championed the United States’ entry into World War I, spoke out against immigration, and presented himself as an old-fashioned married man. McPherson relied on a sexualized femininity that conveyed a compelling image of the traditional heterosexual woman. The rumors of sexual impropriety that followed McPherson—including an international scandal in which a purported four-week-long kidnapping was thought by many to be a cover-up for an adulterous affair—greatly increased her followers’ support and enhanced her embodiment of normal heterosexuality. McPherson’s fame and sexual appeal were so great that she was parodied in Broadway shows, as in this ironic lyric from “A Lady Must Live” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (from their 1931 show
America’s Sweetheart
):

If she is not a cold-blooded person,