The Queer Sixties

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 31 MAY 1999

The bold premise of Smith's anthology is that contemporary lesbian and gay culture did not begin in June 1969 with the Stonewall riots. These 14 essays by "scholars trained as literary critics" do not form a social history, but "employ the methodologies of textual criticism to `read' the queer iconography" present in much 1960s culture. Smith's contributors cover both obvious subjects--lesbian pulp novels, the British playwright Joe Orton and Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band--and surprising ones: Valerie Solanas and the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Dusty Springfield's career and the homoeroticism of Jim Morrison. Smith's instinct that representations of homosexuality were not only prevalent in 1960s culture but clearly set the stage for the gay liberation movement is persuasive, and her choice of topics expands the parameters of how "queer culture" is conceptualized. At their best, the essays make astonishing, even brilliant associative leaps. In "Give Us a Kiss," Ann Shillinglaw links surrealism and sexual alienation in her dissection of the homoeroticism of the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night. In "Myra Breckenridge and the Pathology of Heterosexuality," Douglas Eisner uses New Left politics and feminism to explicate Gore Vidal's work. Unfortunately, many of the essays are shot through with the jargon of postmodern critical theory ("Solanas's attempt to resignify `scum' in her manifesto must take into account its previous use by dominant discourses"), which may diminish the readership for this notable collection of essays.