ellauri042.html on line 811: Sacks forbade any mention of his homosexuality, though he had told his would-be biographer Wechsler about his closeted yearnings and crippled attempts at love. His Boswell shelved the notes for 30 years. Ollie changed his mind on his deathbed: Do it! You must!
ellauri107.html on line 244: Claggart’s repressed, closeted attraction to Billy finds parallels with some interpretations of Hawthorne’s evident spurning of Melville’s too intimate attentions and Hawthorne’s character in The Blithedale Romance Coverdale’s similar rejection of the invitation from Holingsworth to be his “friend of friends, forever.” For Melville, Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale’s agonizing acknowledgement of adultery must have seemed a stunning parallel with what later generations would term “coming out of the closet.” Whether Hawthorne himself were a closeted gay man, it is clear that Melville was relatively open in his affections for the senior author and that those affections were somehow turned away and seem to have left a wound that never fully healed. The evils of the closet constitute a subtext in Billy Budd that may well have brought to its author’s mind the sad sundering of his closeness with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
ellauri107.html on line 246: Billy Budd provides an implicit indictment of the culture, whether military or civil, that encourages the kind of closet where a Claggart so readily succumbs to his “depravity according to nature.” Captain Vere likewise shows a closed, perhaps also “closeted” mind as ready prey for the phenomenon of evil. In Vere’s presence, as Billy is struck dumb by Claggart’s accusation, Claggart is struck dead by a single blow from Billy’s fist, the only response he can muster to defend himself. Although Vere cherishes Billy as “an angel of God” and knows him to be innocent of Claggart’s charges, he resists any bending of rules to protect him against the harshest of consequences for his act of insubordination. Ruthlessly silencing the dictates of his heart, “sometimes the feminine in man,” Vere effects what Claggart’s malice alone could not -- Billy’s total destruction.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 416: Recent criticism has suggested reading Crane´s poems—"The Broken Tower", "My Grandmother´s Love Letters", the "Voyages" series, and others—with an eye to homosexual meanings in the text. Queer theorist Tim Dean argues, for instance, that the obscurity of Crane´s style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual—not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: "The intensity responsible for Crane´s particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy."
xxx/ellauri261.html on line 261: Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town has become a staple of high school drama departments, attractive perhaps more for its economical lack of scenery and props than for its sad story of love, loss and regret. There has been speculation that the character of Simon Stimson, the town drunk and organist for the Congregational Church who eventually commits suicide, represents a closeted gay man destroyed by life in a small town.
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