Queerness in Thomas Pynchon

[matthew.percy at utoronto.ca]

Just to jump way farther ahead in discussing _GR_.  Does anybody find
TRP's use of homosexuality in _GR_ to be just a little screwed up?
Here's my take on things:
1)  Crutchfield and The Westward Man-  Pynchon "queers" and thereby
undermines the myth of the frontiersman/cowboy hero, a homoerotic myth
if there ever was one.  I kept on thinking of _Rio Bravo_, probably the 
most homoerotic (unintentionally or not), Western I've ever seen (Remember
John Wayne ignoring the advances of Angie Dickinson, telling her he'd 
rather get back to the boys [Ricky Nelson, Dean Martin] in the jail; John 
Wayne's discussion with Ricky Nelson on the importance of packing a big
gun!).  It would seem to be that Mr. P has picked up on Fiedler's assertion
that most of the force behind the Great American Novel stems from it being
homoerotic buddy fiction, and run with it.  So obviously, we have a rel. 
positive portrayal of homosexuality here, which is contrasted with:

2)  Queerness at the end of Section 3 of _GR_.  Clive Mossmoon and Sir 
Marcus, the comparison b/w the "meaningful" homoeroticism shared by men
in the trenches of WWI, which has now been replaced "by this idle and bitchy
faggitry" (616) of the Rocket-State.  Kept thinking of Sedgwick's _Between
Men_ and the notion of men promoting men's interests here.  Obviously, we
have here a negative portrayal of homosexuality.

I've managed to reconcile Pynchon's
distinction b/w two types of homosexual "love" (one positive, the other 
negative), but I was just interested in whether anyone finds Pynchon's
depiction of queerness unsettling, or homophobic, problematic, whatever.
It's interesting that Pynchon's dismantling of binarie systems of thought
seem to always favor one half of the binary (the half favoring a 
"subjective/probabilistic" side of truth) at the expense of the other.
(i.e. it's clear that Pynchon definitely supports Mexico at the expense
of Pointsman; Crutchfield and Westwardman above Clive and Marcus...)

- Death to PowerBallads,
Matt