Prize-shortlisted poet Ralf Webb begins his compact study of same-sex desire in four 20th-century American authors with Tennessee Williams, who said he couldn’t write a play without a character he lusted after. In A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), he wrote one everyone else fell for, too, in the shape of antihero Stanley Kowalski – for the writer Gore Vidal, a sharp turn from the traditional dashing male lead to a “sexed” one, at least as embodied by a cap-sleeved Marlon Brando. A month after its first performance, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male: 800 pages of incendiary testimony from anonymised interviewees to the commonplace nature of gay desire at a time when the US army stigmatised it as a perversion weakening national might.
A growing contemporary interest in Freud, together with panic about communist subversives, added to the volatile swirl shaping ideas of sex at the time Strange Relations’s other central case studies – Carson McCullers, John Cheever and James Baldwin – lived and worked. Webb’s approach, more silky synthesis than scholarly spadework, mixes lecture-hall lit crit with the style of a jet-set spy thriller: “January 1889, Camden, New Jersey.” So begins an opening chapter on how Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass laid the ground for how American writers might conceive of gay desire in the coming century: “In the dimly lit living room of a modest, two-storey timber-framed house, an enormous grey-bearded man lolls on his rocking chair, a wolfskin draped over the back. Dusk falls... he is ill. Seriously ill. This is the American poet Walt Whitman, at 69.”
