Pynchon and homophobia

[marc]

John Boylan wrote:
> 
>   The stance of the 60's left toward homosexuality was a carry-over
> from 30's Marxists linking inversion to upper class decadence, and
> decadence then to Facism and National Socialism.
>   So in the 60's you get this odd spectacle of a left-wing artist
> who is also gay, like the Italian movie and opera director Luchino
> Visconti, making THE DAMNED, which ties in aristocratic effeteness
> with homosexuality, incest, and transvestism, and links all *that*
> to Nazism.

The "vice" (for want of a better word) which loops all of the above together 
with Nazism, most conspicuously in The Damned, is narcissism, no? 

I think the connection between power and that retentive, self-reflexive 
patriarchal perversity spoke rather well to the life-denying nature of power, 
at least in the UK. It *is* a stereotype, but not without substance. Do I 
need to mention the English Public School system? It might be worth 
considering the ambivalent homoeroticism of Lindsay Anderson's "If...", 
released the previous year, which confronted the paradox you're describing, 
from an anarchist position. 

It would be horrendous, of course, if a reader were to infer from GR that all 
gay men are rich and powerful misogynists, but I don't think that's a very 
easy or plausible reading these days, if it ever was. 

>   BTW, I dislike the term "homophobia" -- it implies that those who
> disagree with us are not just wrong, but are mentally  ill.

Isn't that precisely how and why it came into usage? To reverse the recieved 
wisdom that homosexuality was a form of mental illness? I thought it worked 
as a brilliantly successful piece of linguistic deterritorialisation... 

rgds, marc.
-- 

http://pcecef.dph.aber.ac.uk/~sybil/