Jesse Monteagudo: This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VII Issue 162). It is reprinted with permission on www.gaytoday.com online. Jesse Monteagudo is an author and activist who lives in South Florida. As a writer and a gay man, Monteagudo owes much to his two alma maters: Miami-Dade Community College and Florida International University. His e-mail is jessemonteagudo@aol.com online.
Harvard College, the oldest university in the United States (1636), is also this country's most important institution of higher learning. For almost four centuries the men (and, more recently, the women) who graduated from Harvard have contributed more than their share to American government, economics, religion, art, literature, music, science and philosophy.
In The Crimson Letter Douglass Shand-Tucci, who graduated from Harvard in 1972, explores the way the gay sons of Harvard shaped their alma mater and, by extension, American culture. Though this book aims to be comprehensive, there is no mention of Sons of Harvard: Gay Men from the Class of 1967 (1983) by Toby Marotta, himself a Harvard alumnus.
“This study's more than usually personal and oftentimes near elegiac perspective is one result of the way it focuses at various points on the work's impetus or inspiration,” Shand-Tucci tells us. “It is my perspective, bound somewhat to melancholy and meant here as foil and contrast to this book's necessarily broad, indeed dynamic historical sweep . . .” Like most Harvard alums, Shand-Tucci is true to his school; and the Harvard that emerges in The Crimson Letter is the center of the gay universe.
As the author told the New York Times, “there are not more gays at Harvard than anyplace else. But when you put together that such an enormous number of gay men who influenced the arts and culture came out of Harvard, it is a significant phenomena.” In fact, if you add up – like Shand-Tucci seems to do in his book – every gay man who taught at Harvard, graduated from Harvard, dropped out of Harvard, hung around Harvard, or even visited Harvard, the list is quite impressive. This passage is a good example of Shand-Tucci's propensity for name-dropping:
“Harvard's own gay experience only with great difficulty struggled into the light in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, observable chiefly in the increasingly rebellious profile of gay students, faculty, and alumni. . . . [John] Boswell was a Bostonian. Another graduate student in history soon to be heard from was Ohioan Charles Shively, who stayed in Boston. Guy Davenport, a budding writer from Duke, was a southerner working on his Ph.D. Raised in Aruba, novelist-to-be Andrew Holleran was an undergraduate in Lowell House. Both settled outside New England after Harvard.
In the mid-1950s, Roger Brown came to Harvard from the University of Michigan. Most hailed from New York City. Critic and author Richard Hall was first on the scene in the late 1950s. Like Hall, Andrew Tobias was an undergraduate. Martin Duberman was a graduate student in history who ended up back in New York. He took his doctoral degree in 1957, the year after [Franklin] Kameny took his in astronomy, then departed for Washington.
That same year Barney Frank arrived in Cambridge from New Jersey. The way he and Kameny spend their youth and middle age shuttling between Boston, New York, and Washington was typical. So was the fact that the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies founded by Duberman was at the City University of New York. It was in the same city he had helped to found the Gay Academic Union, the pioneering group of gay scholars in 1973.”
Though Shand-Tucci's Harvard is a “who's who” of Gay American History, The Crimson Letter does not impress us as a work of history. Rather, it is just a collection of (admittedly entertaining) anecdotes; potted biographies of men who have nothing in common with one another except their gayness – and Harvard.
In fact, the most influential men in Shand-Tucci's book – Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde – did not teach or study but only made brief visits. To Shand-Tucci, Whitman and Wilde represent two different gay archetypes: “the warrior (and by extension the athlete, the worker, the man's man – in fact, the modern Western bourgeois gay man)” (Whitman) and “the aesthete (by extension the artist, the littérateur, and in some measure the dandy and the bohemian)” (Wilde).
“Both Whitman and Wilde visited Harvard Yard and left behind there, as we will see time and again in this book, more than a little of themselves.” Shand-Tucci's gay men, in Harvard or elsewhere, are “Whitmanic” or “Wildean”; though often a bit of both.
To Douglass Shand-Tucci, “most gay history lies buried in bachelor graves”. His Harvard is populated by a “galaxy of bachelor dons who have always perhaps more than anyone else fueled any college on a day-to-day basis. Under cover of their pedigree . . . they created a thriving gay subculture that in time would surface boldly.”
Harvard's gay history is dotted with “romantic friendships” between a “bachelor” professor and one or more favorite students whom the professor would take under his wing. One such worthy was William Amory Gardner (“WAG”), a founder and “resident aesthete at Groton School,” who built a self-styled “Pleasure Dome” on campus complete with “an indoor swimming pool, a small theater, squash courts, and an attached maze.”
According to Shand-Tucci, when a “well-known minister” visited WAG he was taken into the bedroom where “WAG, breakfast porridge in hand, stark naked (except for a pair of outrageous slippers), was with a student, similarly naked, who was reclining on WAG's sofa . . . Teacher and student, in a state of nature, were attended by a butler in morning coat, holding more porridge! Furthermore, by no means taken aback at visitors, WAG, according to Groton historian Frank Ashburn, promptly ‘dropp[ed] an elaborate curtsy.'” Though in 2003 he would have been arrested for statutory rape, in his time Gardner “went on to be an excellent master and also a generous donor for Groton.”
Shand-Tucci summarized the Harvard gay experience in four words – “pederasty, aristocracy, secrecy and guilt” – “the overall pattern, the home game, historically, for homosexuals at Harvard.” Many Harvard gays escaped this stifling atmosphere by fleeing to nearby Boston, where they joined “bohemian” clubs like “the Papyrus, the Tavern, and the St. Botolph” or frequented bars like the Napoleon Club and the Casablanca.
Others sought release in places like the men's room of Harvard's “notorious Lamont Library”. And a few unlucky ones – like F. O. Matthiessen, who committed suicide (1950) or Newton Arvin, who was arrested for possession of pornography (1960) – were caught in the witch hunts or scandals that were as much a part of Harvard history as the Hasty Pudding Club.
But Harvard's gay history is not without its lighter moments. In The Crimson Letter we read about alum William Sturgis Bigelow, a medical doctor and Asian art collector, who “repaired every summer to Tuckernuck, . . . an island paradise off Nantucket ‘where men,' in John Crowley's words, ‘took their ease, often naked, in an untamed island setting.' The rule was no clothes at all until dinner, when, of course, one was expected to appear in formal dress.”
Then there was James Mills Peirce, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who, as “Professor X”, proved to be ahead of his time by concluding (1891) “that homosexual desire should be thought of as ‘being itself a natural, pure and sound passion, as worthy of the reverence of all fine natures as the honorable devotion of husband and wife, or the ardor of bride and groom.'”
Next to Whitman and Wilde, the most important characters in The Crimson Letter are “Ohio Hellenist” Lucien Price, “the most superb essayist and penetrating social philosopher in New England journalism” (Louis Lyons) and the patrician Prescott Townsend, the “foxy grandpa” who founded the Boston Mattachine Society (1957). These men and others like them make The Crimson Letter worth reading, in spite of all its faults.
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