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Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner - Thomas Pynchon

Style, Fall, 2000 by Mark D. Hawthorne

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The homosexual's closet, such as we see in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), provides protection from a hostile heterosexual world that partly defines sexuality in terms of social responsibilities. Significantly, in Baldwin's novel, the closet is a manufactured room within a manmade building. Of course, while the closet originally offered psychic safety, liberated gay men later identified it with another manmade room, the cell in a prison. Whether the closet is a place of protection or of incarceration, the homosexual who wants to escape from the enclosure also wants to flee the house that contains that closet; thus one direction taken by Gay Liberation in the 1970s was to overflow from the structure to the open street, a movement symbolized by "coming out." This movement is both coming out of the closet and, by extension, out of the building that contains the closet, out of the manmade structure and into a natural environment. In Pynchon's stories, escape tends to move from the natural outside and into the manmade structure as if hiding from the dominant society answers the psychic needs of the protagonists. That is, where the homosexual's closet is negative, Pynchon's homosocial retreat or hideout is positive. In this retreat, male bonding provides escape and relief from outside tyranny and is momentarily unthreatened by its subtextual homoeroticism.

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In "The Secret Integration," the aging alcoholic and the boys, enclosed within a hotel room and thus protected from hostile adults, bond in an emotional union that dissolves the distinction between youth and age and between fantasy and reality. In this story, the alcoholic McAfee briefly recaptures his youth and the boys find a way other than terrorism to relate to the adult world. In this "closeted" space of the hotel room, the desires of the adult and children meld into precarious communication. The boys share their dreams with McAfee, who responds by treating them as adults until he, the actual adult, succumbs to his desire for alcohol and to his own ageism. Under these inevitable pressures, it turns out he marginalizes the children as completely as other adults have marginalized him.

That the boys also create this protective space with Carl Barrington, their imaginary black friend, marks both their adolescent comprehension of how the adult world has used them and a new level of revenge against that world. Only when the actual Mrs. Barrington rejects their attempt to demonstrate their desire to break from the racism of their parents is this space endangered. Her angry words collapse the boys' imaginary space:

"We don't need your help [...] I We don't need any of you on our side. I thank our heavenly Father every day of my life that we don't have any children to be corrupted by the likes of you trash." (191)

They have no alterative other than to send their "friend" to a closet hidden deep in a ruined mansion where he, like their experience with McAfee, can remain inviolate. Because desire is thus sequestered, removed to a space where it touches neither reality nor fantasy, the boys ironically conform to the stereotypical role that their parents have created for them. Unwittingly, the parents have ended the innocence of their children's desire:

Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner - Thomas Pynchon

Style, Fall, 2000 by Mark D. Hawthorne

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