Frankly, I think there really is a latent homosexual subtext to the swimming sequence in A Room with a View, though it may be that the characters in the story were too innocent (or too repressed) to be conscious of it. Consider that the first thing the Helena Bonham Carter character’s younger brother says upon meeting her new boyfriend for the first time is “would you like to take a bathe”–i.e. “can we get naked together”? The minister who goes skinny dipping with them observes that this is “remarkable”, or words to that effect, and tries to pass it off as a joke. Consider that author E. M. Forster was fairly open about being gay.
For all of that, there are still plenty of contexts in which men swim together nude, and even see it as a particularly “he-man” activity. When pressure first arose in the 1970s for the elitists Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis to admit women, members argued that they “couldn’t” because they swam nude in the club pool.
As for the suggestion in King’s Row that homosexuality is related to immaturity, that is a very widespread view of homosexuality which, while spoken of less often in public now, is still fairly well established in our culture. In the late 1960s one of the major American television networks broke the prevailing silence on homosexuality in a then-daring documentary special on the subject. Gay men were shown with their backs to the camera as excerpts from interviews with them were played. One man spoke in agonized tones about how he was struggling to be “cured” and that he understood that his “problem” was that he was “immature”.
In writing this passage in King’s Row, I believe Henry Bellamann was also expressing the common anxiety that homosexuals prey on young people who are not firm about their sexual identity. A common theme among the Religious Right is that homosexuals cannot expand their numbers by reproducing, and so have to “recruit”. The point that homosexuals and bisexuals quite often have children aside, this “recruitment” myth is strongly embedded in our culture. There was a celebrated satire of this in the famous “puppy episode” of the Ellen DeGeneres Show; during the closing credits Laura Dern is awarded a microwave by a member of the “homosexual conspiracy” for having recruited DeGeneres.
There are, incidentally, people who literally believe in the existence of a vast homosexual conspiracy. In the 1960s gay men in the Chicago area developed a kind of password by which to identify one another. Upon meeting a man they thought might also be gay, but being afraid to come out and ask him, some gay men would say “I think we’ve met before; I’m a friend of Dorothy’s”. The reference was to Dorothy Gail, the character played by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, Garland being traditionally associated with female impersonators. U.S. Naval Intelligence got wind of this, and actually made an effort to track down this Dorothy who was the head of the vast gay conspiracy.
To cite an earlier example of homophobia taking the form of a paranoid belief in conspiracy, James Thurber wrote in his book The Years with Ross that The New Yorker had at one time employed a man of rather effiminate demeanor. Although it was apparent to Thurber and a good many other members of the staff that he was gay, it had to be explained to Ross after the man was fired for stealing. Ross later told Thurber that the man had stolen from the magazine because homosexuals always try to hurt “normal” people.
One reason for equating homosexuality with immaturity may be that it provides a rationalization for men who became aware of homosexual inclinations when they entered puberty but have since suppressed them, or else become very good at denying they have them; they can tell themselves that these feelings are a normal part of growing up, and proof of how normal they were, and have become.
While this is a little off-subject, it is a truism that many of the most vocal and adamant homophobes are themselves homosexual. Some homophobes doubtlessly use it as a way of covering up. Some may use it as a way of convincing themselves they are not gay. Some appear to use it as way of venting anger and self-loathing their orientation causes them.
Billy Sol Hargis, a prominent broadcast evangelist of the 1960s, went to jail for various sexual offenses, some involving other men. G. Harrell Carswell, a failed nominee for the Supreme Court during the Nixon Administration, made a career of denouncing homosexuals, right up to the time he went to jail for molesting boys.
It is interesting in this context that many homophobes equate being homosexual with being effete or weak; hence the astonishment some people expressed when it came out that Rock Hudson was gay.
There is an oddly widespread belief in American culture that a man is not “really” a homosexual so long as he uses his penis while having sex. Numerous men who have been prosecuted for beating or even killing gays have openly admitted under questioning that they had sex with their victims, but have not seen a contradiction between this and their insistence that they are themselves not homosexual.
Roy Cohn, the attorney who assisted Joseph McCarthy in his antiCommunist crusade, was a particularly outspoken homophobe for decades. After he died of AIDS it was widely reported that he had paid over one thousand men for sex during his lifetime. Friends of his argued that he honestly did not believe himself to be gay, as he had always been in a “dominant” (if not sadistic) role in his relationships; he may have believed that having sex with a man was okay provided that you paid for it.
It is interesting that the three figures just cited were also adamant antiCommunists. Communism was sometimes equated with homosexuality in films of the 1950s such as My Son John, in
which the all-American Dean Jagger makes a number of gay innuendoes about his son Robert Walker, who is a closeted Communist.
In the case of women, extreme homophobia sometimes seems to be a way of expressing antipathy and discomfort towards men generally. It was noted that during her anti-homosexual crusade Anita Bryant (who was largely ignored when she changed her opinion and apologized for the things she had said about gays) spoke of homosexuality as though it occurred exlusively among men.
There was apparently a time when a great many women actually thought this; Queen Victoria objected to Parliament banning homosexual activity by women as “everybody knew” there wasn’t really such a thing as a Lesbian. Bryant, on the other hand, certainly had the opportunity to know better. Growing up, Bryant and the rest of her family had been dominated by her grandfather, an angry bully who had threatened the life of doctors at the hospital where she was delivered when her mother developed complications during labor. She frankly admitted that she was dominated and manipulated from the start by her first husband, and she later fell into acting as a stooge for an anti-gay rights organization, whose (male) directors told her she did not have their permission to get a divorce. After a lifetime of letting the important men in her life dictate to her, it is understandable that she could have developed an anti-male bias to which she would not admit.
It’s been my observation that some women with a vitriolic distaste for gay men seem to see them as a kind of challenge or competition; they are attractive women who flirt relentlessly, and appear to take the attention they elicit from men generally as an important validation of their own self-worth. The idea that there are men who can get along quite well without women is a challenge to their sense of purpose, place, and value.
To sum up, homophobia did not suddenly come into vogue in our society. It has been around for a long time, and it has been a deep-rooted theme in our culture, tied to a number of other anxieties, and helping shape attitudes about the roles of the sexes generally.
Certainly it predates the AIDS crisis; in fact, it was the rampant homophobia which already existed which helped shape–and confuse–the first public discussions about AIDS. In the mid 1980s, when President Reagan had not yet uttered the word “AIDS” in public, Rev. Jerry Falwell announced that it was his informed opinion (well, actually, he stated it as a fact), that the disease had been created by God as a punishment for homosexuals.