ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Men without Maps, John Ibson uncovers the experiences of men after World War II who had same-sex desires but few affirmative models of how to build identities and relationships. Though heterosexual men had plenty of cultural maps—provided by nearly every engine of social and popular culture—gay men mostly lacked such guides in the years before parades, organizations, and publications for queer persons. Surveying the years from shortly before the war up to the gay rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Ibson considers male couples, who balanced domestic contentment with exterior repression, as well as single men, whose solitary lives illuminate unexplored aspects of the queer experience. Men without Maps shows how, in spite of the obstacles they faced, midcentury gay men found ways to assemble their lives and senses of self at a time of limited acceptance.
REVIEWS
“Ibson has a tradition of finding imaginative ways to understand the history of gender and sexuality, both as identities and as forces guiding lives and behavior. In Men without Maps, he offers a powerful and sympathetic portrayal of the creativity and courageousness of male-desiring American men in the middle of the twentieth century. Ibson’s engaging prose and creative, original, and inspiring analysis make this book an interdisciplinary gem for anyone interested in the history of gay identity and culture. Men without Maps is impossible to read without simultaneously relishing.”
— Tristan Bridges, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Men without Maps is a lovely book. Like Ibson’s earlier work, it is both scholarly and accessible. He convincingly argues that gay men from World War II up to Stonewall had no maps for manhood, in contrast with the ubiquitous maps that served as ‘basic training’ for heterosexual manhood. The book’s clear, deeply moving, and well-drawn prose will interest scholars of LGBTQ studies, masculinities, and sex and gender history.”
— Michael Messner, University of Southern California
"Well researched and thoroughly documented with extensive notes, this slim volume belies its brevity, amply illustrated with photographs from numerous collections that leave the reader wanting more."
— Choice
"The book succeeds in advancing and deepening our knowledge of American gay life in the first half of the last century."
— Journal of American History
"The signal contribution of Men without Maps—as with so much of Ibson’s earlier work—is his ability to capture the quotidian existence of this sampling of gay men simply living their lives, finding joy, and persevering in the midst of a world that was so unwelcoming. This is queer social history at its best."
— The American Historical Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction, Together and Alone. Self-Definition without Many Models
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226656250.003.0000
[cultural guidance;map metaphor;queer spaces;historical perspective;oriented sexuality;role models;sexual identity]
The introduction begins by explaining the book’s use of its map metaphor, part of the book’s very title, and component of an important assumption on which the book rests. Men whom the book examines, the author argues, were relatively mapless when it came to negotiating the meaning of their sexuality, figuring out how to be in a world with few role models. These were men sometimes with virtually no affirmative (or explicit, even if negative) cultural guidance, with few clues (and certainly no encouragement) regarding how to deal with their sexual desires. Relatively speaking, compared to their heterosexual contemporaries, and compared to those with sexual yearnings for other males who would come of age later on, the “men without maps” were largely on their own, especially if they resided away from the country’s few, though growing, queer spaces. There follows a brief discussion of the history of sexual identity, the very notion of oriented sexuality, in American culture. This historical perspective reinforces the author’s crucial point that not only was the sexual identity of the men without maps fiercely scorned during the period covered by this book, that identity was itself fairly new, without a long tradition to draw upon.
Part One. The Real Outlaws: The Male Couple before Gay Liberation
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226656250.003.0001
[Chalmer Cochran;Edward Crouse;Lee Fuller;cultural outlaws;domestic space;Edward Wormley;Frank Leach;Jess Collins;Robert Duncan;Thomas Rolfsen]
Males sharing moments of sexual pleasure were one thing in American culture in the generation before Stonewall, but men who shared domestic space, apart from a few specific settings, were something else again, transgressors more troubling still. Part One introduces several such male couples, characterizing them as genuine cultural outlaws who apparently posed particular threats to their society’s dominant culture. How the outlaws comported and considered themselves, the author maintains, provides fresh insight into queer culture before “gay liberation” as well as into the harsh workings of American culture at large. Among those featured are Lee Fuller and Frank Leach, seemingly mundane middle class men of Monrovia, California; considerably less mundane poet Robert Duncan and painter Jess Collins; and San Francisco Bay Area typesetters Thomas Rolfsen and Chalmer Cochran. The centerpiece of Part One is the coupling of modernist furniture designer Edward Wormley and theater professor Edward Crouse, their involvement beginning during their Midwest boyhoods, thereafter documented by their sometimes-daily correspondence that ended only when late in middle age they realized their lifelong dream of sharing a home. The Wormley-Crouse letters, housed in Cornell’s rich Human Sexuality Collection, is by itself a priceless document, heretofore unused, of twentieth-century queer life.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part Two. Solitary Men: Loneliness and Masculinity
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226656250.003.0002
[cultural recipes;mainstream American masculinity;Stonewall;GLBT Historical Society;Human Sexuality Collection;Minor White;solitary queer men;Texas Christian University;uncoupled queer men]
Part Two examines the experiences of several uncoupled queer men of the generation before Stonewall--assessing the nature, apparent reasons, particular pains and singular advantages of their living lives without domestic companions. Apart from the important modernist photographer Minor White, the men of Part Two are not even moderately well known today, yet all have left behind revealing documents of their lives in correspondence, memoirs, and photographs, much of this material housed in either Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection or the archives of San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society. These men include a chemist, a State Department official, a university clerk, an electrician, and a historian. Especially significant in Part Two is a longtime religion professor at Texas Christian University who left behind a vast collection of snapshots as well as many friends with fond memories of him, some of whom the author interviewed. With individuality, even a certain isolation from others, a common component of mainstream American masculinity, these solitary queer men not only illuminate certain features of gay male life in the generation before Stonewall, but also, more broadly, they exemplify certain problematic paradoxes inhering in the cultural recipes provided to most modern American males.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Afterword. Darkness before Dawn—Being a Gay Male in Midcentury America
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226656250.003.0003
[conformists;Emile Durkheim;identity;deviants;holders;targets]
The book concludes by drawing upon Emile Durkheim’s venerable notion that a society’s “deviants” are often highly valuable to that same society’s conformists, helping the conformists define themselves, if only in a negative, fearful way, as the alleged opposite of the deviants, with bigotry not only afflicting its targets but, in a different way, burdening its holders too. Once gay liberation began taking hold late in the twentieth century, this book concludes, there were various beneficiaries. Gay Americans were, of course, hugely better off once the laws that had punished them and the customs that had inhibited them began to come to an end, and once new rights such as same-sex marriage and service in the military were established. Additionally and of considerable significance, though, is the way in which the lessening of homophobia was better for both targets and holders of hatred. As gay men and lesbians acquired more cultural guidelines, acquiring increasingly more “maps” through which to directly and affirmatively define themselves, a better day dawned for all of American society late in the twentieth century--even though shortly before that dawn had been an especially challenging time for this book’s subjects, men who were comparatively without maps.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
