"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse": The Retro Homphobia of Francis Nevins' Cornell Woolrich Biography First You Dream, Then You Die (1988)

This piece is largely culled from my 55-page article at Crimereads from a few years ago, but I wanted to highlight here the raging homophobia in this book, given my recently publicized assertion that a certain retrograde comment by Otto Penzler, publisher of Dream, suggests how a homophobic book like Dream won an Edgar in 1989.  (This offended Otto so he apparently bounced me from doing an intro for Mysterious Press on gay crime writer Rufus King.)

Penzler's comment was actually a claim that men supposedly write better than women because men try to write literature, so it wasn't about homosexuality at all. Yet retrograde sexism and retrograde homophobia frequently go hand-in-hand.  Though actually I said it was Nevins' bio that was homophobic, not the publisher of the book.

But what I was trying to get at and maybe not conveying in a one sentence comment, was that there must have been an obtuseness on the part of Otto and other people (like the Edgar Award committee) not to see the dreadful homophobia in the book, assuming they really read it.  Or maybe they simply shared Nevins' attitudes.  I don't know.  I think people just easily bought into the "self-hating homosexual" cliche which is the keystone of Nevins' Woolrich thesis.  This cliche was dutifully trotted out for decades by people writing about Woolrich and it still is even today, so it's been a hardy perennial.

Writer Barry Malzberg has said that Nevins regards homosexuality as a "pathological" condition.  It does appear that way from his writing, because Nevins seems convinced that to be gay (a term he never uses) is to be self-hating.  If you're interested in this subject read below the excerpt from my article.  It still amazes me how the nasty anti-gay attitudes emanating from the book never drew any offended notice, with a few exceptions like Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, until my article appeared.  Malzberg and Pronzini are straight guys and they definitely managed to notice it. Anyway, here's the article excerpt.  Gird your loins and grab your wig for this look at homophobia in the Eighties AIDS era!

Self-hating, tearful Catholic homosexual and supportive friend in the original film version of
The Boys in the Band (1970)

How is the self-loathing homosexuality which Francis Nevins believes to have been the black wellspring of Cornell Woolrich’s unique writing genius reflected in the author’s voluminous crime fiction?  Here are examples from Dream of what Nevins terms "homosexual symbolism" in Woolrich's work:

"I was carrying Death around in my mouth," the reporter tells us near the end [of the story "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair," where a dentist fills cavities with cyanide], and if one is determined to find subtle traces of Woolrich's homosexuality everywhere in his work, one might as well begin here. (p. 129)

While struggling with Cook over a gun, the hobo is shot in the mouth (here we go again, homosexual symbol seekers!) (p. 141)

....they arrange for a pickpocket accomplice to take a ride on the same train that is bringing Bull to the state pen, sit in the seat behind the mobster and quietly puncture Bull's rear end with a hypodermic full of germs (homosexuality symbol hunters take notice!) (p. 157)

All these instances seem reductive to my mind--not to mention remarkably puerile and in dubious taste. Since Woolrich was a gay man, so the reasoning seems to run, inevitably any time in his tales when poison, bullets or germs enter a man's mouth or buttocks it symbolizes homosexuality. In this juvenile egg hunt for "homosexual symbols" Nevins focuses relentlessly on sex acts.  Is it Woolrich who associated gay sex with death or is it Nevins who has imposed this meaning on Woolrich's texts?  Dream appeared in 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, something which may have influenced Nevins' take on this matter.  Yet unless he was endowed with second sight, like his seer character in Night Has a Thousand Eyes/"Speak to Me of Death, Woolrich could not have foreseen this calamity.

I have read my share of Woolrich (granted, Nevins has read everything, as Dream makes abundantly clear) and for my part I cannot say that in the author’s work I am strongly struck by intimations of same-sex attraction on his part.  Woolrich often does write well from a woman’s viewpoint, but he writes convincingly from a tough male viewpoint as well.  Seemingly absent from Woolrich’s fiction is the sustained interest in the male body which I have found in the work of gay male vintage crime writers like Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb (aka Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge), Rufus King, Milton Propper and Todd Downing. 

I am powerfully struck in Woolrich’s work by an aching depiction of loneliness, despair and doom, yet, Nevins notwithstanding, this is not a state of mind which is specific to gay men. Any person, whatever his or her sexual orientation, might have these feelings and give expression to them in fiction.

Given Nevins’ writing about Woolrich, it is not surprising to see that he authored an 1977 article about Milton Propper, identifying him as another “tragic” homosexual, and that in a 2010 Mystery*File article he condemned Patricia Highsmith along the same lines as Woolrich, whom he passingly denigrates in his harshest terms yet: “If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don’t know the meaning of those words till you’ve encountered Highsmith.  Both, of course, were homosexual.  I gather from [Joan Schenkar’s biography] that Highsmith…was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian….Woolrich was perhaps the most deeply closeted, self-hating homosexual male author that ever lived.”

If you are sensing an invidious theme here, I would hazard to guess that you are right.  Elsewhere in Dream Nevins refers passingly to “the special agonies of the homosexual whose religious roots are Catholic” (Woolrich’s father had been a nominal Catholic and Woolrich adopted the faith, at least nominally, near the end of his life); and he speculates that Woolrich and Catholic film director Alfred Hitchock, who adapted a Woolrich short story as his renowned flick Rear Window, shared the same pessimistic worldview--that the world was “a hideous and terrifying place”--on account of their “longing for physical relationships which the obesity of the one man and the homosexuality of the other seemed to put forever out of reach.” Evidently both stoutness and queerness constituted crippling hurdles to human happiness in Nevins’ mind.

When gathering such black pearls of wisdom about members of the queer community in my basket of literary boners, I am frequently reminded of the morbid line from the pioneering if at times problematic queer film The Boys in the Band, which premiered in March 1970, just a year-and-a-half after Cornell Woolrich’s death.  “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse,” pronounces one of the film’s characters.  (Yes, this character is a self-loathing, lapsed-Catholic gay man.)  In his writing about Woolrich and other crime writers whom he deems to have been queer, Nevins seems to have drawn this dismal credo deep into his heart.