Some of The Problematic Public Gay Men Image Originates from Problematic Relationships on Gay Novels
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Finestère, written by Fritz Peters and published in 1951, is the story of a wealthy American of a wealthy American adolescent who moves to Paris with his mother following his parents’ divorce. At boarding school, 15-year-old Matthew struggles with loneliness and initiates a romantic relationship with his school’s athletic director, a choice that will end in tragedy for all involved.
If you haven’t read the book but it already sounds familiar, it may be because Finestère is a classic and early example of the “homosexual novel”, a popular genre in the mid-20th century that typically included (by now) well-worn tropes like closetedness, divorce, shame, alienation, and suicide.
While time has passed those stereotypes by, Finestère
(or “land’s end” in English and pronounced fin-iss-tair in French)
reads almost as if it were written today.
PETERS’ PORTRAYAL OF MATTHEW’S COMING-OF-AGE—WITH HIS ADOLESCENT AWKWARDNESS BLOSSOMING INTO SELF-AWARENESS AND SEXUAL CONFIDENCE—FEELS STRIKINGLY MODERN FOR A NOVEL WRITTEN NEARLY 75 YEARS AGO.
WHILE THERE’S A GENERAL PERCEPTION THAT GAY AMERICA’S SEXUAL AWAKENING ONLY OCCURRED AFTER THE 1969 STONEWALL UPRISING, THE POPULAR CONVERSATION AROUND GAY LIVES GOT STARTED WITH THESE “HOMOSEXUAL NOVELS.” FINESTĂˆRE SOLD 350,000 COPIES IN THE UNITED STATES AND WENT THROUGH AT LEAST EIGHT HARDBACK EDITIONS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
While there’s a general perception that gay America’s sexual awakening
only occurred after the 1969 Stonewall uprising, the popular conversation around gay lives got started with these “homosexual novels.” Finestère sold 350,000 copies in the United States and went through at least eight hardback editions in the United Kingdom.
In the foreword to a new edition of the book, Dr. Christopher Adams at the University of Southampton in England, who recently completed a screenplay adaptation of the novel, highlights a recurring device Peters uses to describe Matthew’s conflicting desires, and which foreshadows his tragic (and for the time, inevitable) end.
One such passage in the book reads: “The pleasure, the sheer physical delight of his body in the water possessed him to such an extent that he wanted to stay in it forever; against this, like a warning hammer, came the feeling of danger lurking in the water, threatening to pull him under and envelop him, drag him to the muddy bottom.”
Adams shared his thoughts about Finestère’s place among the great books in the gay canon in a recent conversation from the South of France, where he was on holiday.
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LGBTQ Nation: You write in the foreword that Finestère was influential for an entire generation of queer readers “for good or ill.” How so?
Dr. Christopher Adams: When talking about the homosexual novel and novels from the post-war period, you can talk about them in the positive way, in terms of representation. These novels really are at the forefront of centering the gay male experience in a way in literature that hadn’t been done before. They’re really the first novels to openly do so.
They cause a lot of controversy and talk during their time, and they slowly start to shift attitudes toward homosexuality. Novels like Finestère, which sort of leap across the Atlantic, are directly influential in changing the social discourse of the time period, particularly in the early 1950s.
But then you can also think about what kind of comes later, in terms of the backlash against these novels that happens later in the late ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, where they start to be seen as novels of the closet, as with Finestère’s vaguely ambiguous but almost certain ending that Matthew has thrown himself into the sea. He’s committed suicide.
And that’s where the novels of this era gain this reputation of involving closetedness, suicide, all of the tragic life events that seem to adhere to gay men in this period. And it sort of shapes the way that people think about homosexuality in the era as well.
You say the book popularized the homosexual novel as a genre, “while also framing in the United States, at least, these story arcs as tragic.” How is the framing different for books written by American authors versus those in the UK and other places?
In the U.K., the novels themselves don’t actually often seem to be that tragic in the same way as they do in the U.S.. I’m thinking of American work like James Barr’s Quatrefoil and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, all ending in these really tragic deaths of their protagonists. In the U.K., it’s a bit more complicated or nuanced. U.K. gay novels will often end in a slightly more ambiguous way. The protagonist will remain alive, but it’s kind of unclear how they’re going to carry on a bit.
You could talk about British author Mary Renault and her novel The Last of the Wine from 1956. It’s set in ancient Greece about two lovers, one of them does die, but he dies gloriously in battle, leaving his lover alive. So there is a death, but it’s a hero’s death and his partner remains. So it’s open to interpretation depending on the reader.
One of the big U.K. novels from 1953 was The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland, which is a murder mystery story about a gay psychologist/detective. He’s investigating a gay suicide. So there is gay death. But in the background, he has a kind of house boy or man who helps him out and at the very end of the novel, they kind of decide that they like each other and go off together. So, it’s this blending of tragic events with sometimes more hopeful elements.
That sounds like a film franchise or a Netflix series.
Yes!
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Describe some of the tropes found in homosexual novels.
I guess the cliche of the tropes—and this has been a question of whether or not they’re true—would be that people are closeted. People feel bad about themselves constantly. They’re sometimes trapped in marriages with women, they commit suicide, or they or they die in some way. They may go see psychologists or psychiatrists who try to change them or fix them if they’re being medicalized or pathologized. Slightly more neutral tropes would be things like age gaps in relationships. Those are quite common in the homosexual novel.
Gore Vidal, the gay author and social commentator, wrote of Finestère, “It is difficult for most American authors to write a novel about a homosexual affair without making either a tract or an apologia. Mr. Peters has done neither. Instead, he has kept resolutely in focus his great theme: the corruption and murder of innocence.” Would Vidal disagree with your assessment in the foreword that the book describes the protagonist’s homosexuality as inevitably tragic?
I’ve just been reading Gore Vidal’s Empire at the moment. He’s a very slippery figure, Vidal. And his own relationship to homosexuality—to his own homosexuality—is so complicated.
I mean, at the time there is the sense that homosexuality itself is inherently tragic, and when I hear his quote, I think he’s mostly trying to position himself in relationship to other homosexual writers that he has standing beefs with, Truman Capote and others.
His list of beefs is very long, but he did seem to apparently like Finestère. And so I guess it’s thinking about who he’s referring to when he thinks of tracts or apologias.
But then at the same time, I find his concern around the corruption of the innocence of youth also kind of plays into the language of the time period, which saw adolescent homosexuality or adolescence as something that could be corrupted by homosexuality.
Maybe a positive spin on his quote would be something like, “What is the murder or the corruption of innocence there?” It’s the surrounding society that does not accept this, does not accept Matthew’s sexuality, does not accept his own choices.
How would you describe Peters’ treatment of Matthew’s gay coming-of-age story? And would an author today, 70 years later, handle it any differently?
I think what I find really interesting and compelling about the book is that he seems to treat Matthew’s adolescence and coming of age forthrightly and very seriously, and he takes Matthew’s feelings very seriously throughout the book.
Whatever we think about the morality of what’s going on, I feel like Peters really treats Matthew’s feelings as important and central, and we understand where he’s coming from when he falls in love with Michel, when he has his big crush on Scott.
Nowadays, I feel like it’s very tricky, I guess, particularly at this exact moment in the political discourse where, again, we seem to be reentering a moment where adolescence and sexuality are causing all kinds of stirring up and backlash.
Looking at what’s going on around debates of LGBTQ+ issues, but particularly around youth and adolescence, the same tropes are being deployed as they were in the 1980s and as they were in the 1950s, which in some ways I think is a tragedy.
Matthew meets his boarding school’s new athletic director, Michel, when Matthew is 15 going on 16, and he instigates a romantic relationship. The 30-year-old is attracted to Matthew, but it’s Matthew who makes the first move, and after initially objecting, Michel is receptive. What was the reaction at the time to Peters giving that kind of agency to someone Matthew’s age?
It doesn’t appear to have been much of an issue. The fact that Michel is twice Matthew’s age didn’t really seem to raise many eyebrows. What popped up in the reviews was a sense of—kind of going to that thing around the corruption of youth—in the midcentury mind there appeared to be a point at which one was settled in one’s ways. One had chosen the life of homosexuality. And for adolescents, for teenagers—the concept of teenagers just being birthed at this moment—you could still be kind of fluid.
A lot of the reviews refer to Michel as the homosexual man, and Matthew is not actually labeled as homosexual. He’s just an adolescent. The age isn’t the important thing. It’s the fact that Michel is a homosexual.
You mentioned earlier that in the late ’60s and ’70s the gay liberation movement declared novels like Finestère the epitome of everything they stood against, including trauma, closeted life, tragic endings, and, to some extent, relationships between older and younger men. How did the last fit into that list of objectionable scenarios among gay rights advocates?
As the 1970s moves into the ’80s, particularly, you get a divergence in the gay political movements: one that’s much more radical and one that moves toward kind of respectability politics. And the respectability politics movement is wanting, in some ways, to sanitize their image, again, because it’s a very common trope that anti-gay factions are using to push against the gay community, right? There’s this sense of wanting to jettison that aspect of the past.
So more broadly, wanting to ditch the literature of the ’50s and ’60s, or the literature of the closet, is not only a kind of psychological move of like, “We need to put this behind us and move on.” But some of it is the different political paths that gay politics takes.
If it was written today, how do you think Finestère would be received?
It feels of its time, and it’s strange in that way. It’s written in the early 1950s, it’s set in the 1920s and the early ’30s and, in some ways, the conversation now seems to have moved on.
My sense of particularly LGBTQ publishing is it’s a very fast-moving field. There’d be a question of even what genre this is now. Is this for YA (young adult) audiences, or is this an adult novel or a young adult novel? Publishing itself has changed significantly in 70 years since this was first published, right? And what we even think of as a queer book or a queer novel now is different from when this was published. It’s one of the founding texts of the genre, and the genre has changed.
What was some of the other queer literature from his day that may have influenced Peters’ writing?
The immediate book just before Finestère would have been Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, which was really the first homosexual novel out of the gate in the late ’40s. I assume he would have been aware of it, or possibly not. It makes me think of various boarding school novels, which I don’t know if America has much of a tradition of them, but certainly in the U.K. there are many titles.
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Describe what you say is the lost cultural concept of “romantic friendship” found in those boarding school novels.
The “romantic friendship” is a close relationship between two boys or two girls, almost always set in the context of boarding schools or single-sex environments. You get very close emotional entanglements that could include jealousy, crushes—they may not exactly be named as crushes, but that’s clearly what’s going on in some of the boarding school novels—you’ll get hints at sexual activity that’s taking place around or within the relationship.
And the sort of general thinking was that you could experience these sorts of relationships, often at your privileged boarding school, but then when you went to university or got out of university, you had passed through that phase and were now ready for your full development as a heterosexual. And you would then either marry a man or a woman, depending.
Peters was married to a woman and had children, but I take it he had sex with men, as well.
Yeah, he’s queer, he’s bisexual, he’s something, definitely not straight. But yes, he was married to a woman or women, but he also had numerous affairs with men. We know this because he appears in the Phil Andros Stud File, which is the index card file kept by this man, Samuel Stewart, in Chicago, of every man that he ever slept with names and random details, and Fritz Peters appears in that.
What’s a favorite “homosexual novel” of yours, besides Finestère?
One book I’m particularly keen on is called Aubade, which was published in 1957 and was written by a working-class Northern Irish gay 16-year-old named Kenneth Martin that managed to get published. It’s quite a small story, but it’s a coming-of-age story about a young man in Northern Ireland who, again, falls in love with an older medical student. He’s 16 and the medical student is 20 and they have a little summer flame and then decide to part ways.
After spending so much time with the book, what stands out about Finestère?
I find the book very compelling for its mixture of both homosexuality and how it really relentlessly looks at the society around Matthew, and suggests that it’s the world around him, and not him himself, who has the issue, which I think is very important, imaginatively, for the book to do.
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