Yes, they understood him to be gay - but he wasn't "out" to them. Point taken, though. I was interpreting this line: "Men who had sex with men, and women who had sex with women would always have had some people in their lives who knew perfectly well who they had sex with, and others who understood implicitly, and others who could have understood if they wanted to, and others from whom this knowledge was deliberately hidden. " - partly in that, at least up until he was, what, 35 or more, Sal wasn't having sex with men, and in your description, quoted above, the "knowledge" seems more benign than it is in Sal's story.
I haven't read any of the books on your list, only Epistemology of the Closet, and not all of that, so I should probably know better than to talk the way I'm talking - but it's more about keeping the awareness of pervasive terror alive.
One other thing I wanted to mention, and again I read some Marvel comics growing up, but don't really remember them - didn't really like them, but my brother had stacks and I would go on binges. And what's really critical, I haven't read any of the slash, so I'm not sure exactly what you're responding to. But that said, Captain America doesn't seem to me to be representing the 40s or WWII *in general* (as in, "he's from the 40s, therefore he would have...") but rather seems like a kind of back-formation, a later image formed out of a cultural ideal that became more dominant in the 50s, though I think it was an element earlier - Bing Crosby's America - shudder. In fact, maybe partly a sentimental ideal related to the extreme loss and displacement, the death on a massive scale - all the old "familiar" places - in the war. I think part of that is, as you say, like the unspoiled countryside in Raymond Williams - that purity that is always only just recently destroyed, and then becomes ossified and inaccessible. There's a thing in TJ Clark about this, how WWI is further away than the Renaissance (not that I actually believe this, and I think you're arguing against it and that's good). But I do think that's part of how the "magic" works in the case of Capt America, which is just reinforced but not invented by thawing him out in the 21st century. He always already belongs to an inaccessible, sentimentalized past. If that makes sense - an ill-informed impression.
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Date: 2012-06-14 03:58 pm (UTC)I haven't read any of the books on your list, only Epistemology of the Closet, and not all of that, so I should probably know better than to talk the way I'm talking - but it's more about keeping the awareness of pervasive terror alive.
One other thing I wanted to mention, and again I read some Marvel comics growing up, but don't really remember them - didn't really like them, but my brother had stacks and I would go on binges. And what's really critical, I haven't read any of the slash, so I'm not sure exactly what you're responding to. But that said, Captain America doesn't seem to me to be representing the 40s or WWII *in general* (as in, "he's from the 40s, therefore he would have...") but rather seems like a kind of back-formation, a later image formed out of a cultural ideal that became more dominant in the 50s, though I think it was an element earlier - Bing Crosby's America - shudder. In fact, maybe partly a sentimental ideal related to the extreme loss and displacement, the death on a massive scale - all the old "familiar" places - in the war. I think part of that is, as you say, like the unspoiled countryside in Raymond Williams - that purity that is always only just recently destroyed, and then becomes ossified and inaccessible. There's a thing in TJ Clark about this, how WWI is further away than the Renaissance (not that I actually believe this, and I think you're arguing against it and that's good). But I do think that's part of how the "magic" works in the case of Capt America, which is just reinforced but not invented by thawing him out in the 21st century. He always already belongs to an inaccessible, sentimentalized past. If that makes sense - an ill-informed impression.