Queerness in Thomas Pynchon

[Tresy Kilbourne]

> I was just interested in whether anyone finds Pynchon's
>depiction of queerness unsettling, or homophobic, problematic, whatever.
I think it's quite clear that for Pynchon, homosexuality is 
life-negating. Even his Westwardman spoof is evidence of this, as it is 
using homosexuality to ridicule hypermasculinity as a sublimation of 
homoeroticism. Queerness is the punchline as putdown. Remember that GR is 
a sixties novel and reflects its zeitgeist; hippies wore their hair long, 
not because they were comfortable with their feminine side, but because 
they didn't feel they had a feminine side to repress, unlike (in their 
pop Freudian psychology) the hyper-repressed faggots of the 
military-industrial complex, whose perverted sexuality was expressed via 
napalm and penile weaponry. 

Like the antisemitism of Lawrence and Eliot, homophobia was part of the 
(counter)cultural air Pynchon breathed when he was writing GR. Wish it 
were otherwise, but there you have it. 

_________
Tresy Kilbourne, Seattle WA
"The environment's in trouble -- and the more it suffers, the tougher it 
is on your skin."
   --Seventeen Magazine