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Eight years separate the publication of Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948) and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), but the novels share a great deal in common. Both tell the story of a white American man who serves in the Army, travels widely, and comes to realize that he is sexually attracted to men. In both novels, the protagonist experiences a deep and lasting attraction to another man, and in both cases this at- traction ends disastrously. In the original 1948 edition of The City and the Pillar, Jim Willard murders Bob Ford, the man he has loved since high school, when Bob rejects his sexual advances; in the revised edition of 1965, Jim rapes Bob instead of murdering him.1 And David, the protago- nist of Giovanni's Room, denies his love for the Italian bartender Giovanni, an act which sends Giovanni into a downward spiral that ends with his execution for murder. Crucial to understanding why these stories of same-sex love end horrifically is yet another similarity, that both Vidal and Baldwin center their novels around what was, at mid-twentieth century, a new social type: the masculine gay man.
Historian George Chauncey argues that "the hetero-homosexual binarism, the sexual regime now hegemonic in American culture"-pre- suming the gender of one's sexual partner to constitute proof of an inner quality called hetero- or homosexuality-"is a stunningly recent creation" (13) emerging only in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Prior to this, an older regime-dating to at least the 1890s in New York City, especially among the working class-defined a man's sexual normality or abnormality not by the gender of his sexual partner(s), but by his gender performance.
Under this older regime, men could have sex with men and remain "normal" so long as they conformed to masculine codes of dress, styling, and bodily comportment, and were careful to take only the ostensibly "active" (penetrative) role in sex with other men. Men who took the "passive" role in sex with other men were known as fairies. Masculine- appearing men, Chauncey argues, could thus have certain kinds of sexual contact with fairies and not be seen as abnormal or unmanly. In terms of "defining the deviant" (22) what mattered was gender performance, not sexual object...