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Title: The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture by Douglass Shand-Tucci ISBN: 0-312-19896-5 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting Nuggets to be Found
Comment: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture is, perhaps, an unfortunate sub-title for the otherwise interesting The Crimson Letter by Douglas Shand-Tucci as it does not quite live up to this rather grandiose idea of shaping american culture. The book, though, is still a fascinating stroll through the past hundred years of Harvard history. It starts a little slowly with the author setting up two archetypes but gathers steam as the twentienth century takes flight. The author does wander around the topic at times as the personality presented connections to Harvard are stretched or evidence of his homosexuality is tenuously produced but he keeps the narrative flowing in and among the varied characters populating this history. A rewarding read for the anyone who sticks with it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Harvard History
Comment: A wonderful, readable history. Author Shand-Tucci combines scholarship with a breezy style, and an amusing array of anecdotes to highlight his thesis. Amidst better-known alums appear some fascinating figures, like Fred Loring ("Two College Friends") and Shirley Everton Johnson ("The Cult of the Purple Rose"), who show us that even if there weren't any gay alliances back in the school's busy 19th century, the Harvard boys found a way.
Rating: 3
Summary: Musty Closets
Comment: As a uncloseted Harvard graduate, I found this book entertaining in a gossipy, derivative, speculative fashion. Certainly, the author is well-read and writes with the flair of a genuine Harvard aesthete, who is also capable of getting down with William Burroughs.
If a Harvard man was a bachelor, and had a couple of verifiably "gay" friends, Mr. Shand-Tucci speculates that he was gay as well. Maybe yes, maybe no, but the proof is not in the pudding.
Speculation makes for great gossip but unreliable history. Of
course, since many of the men discussed were closeted, we have no idea whether they had sex with other men. A good example is
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had a college crush on another student,
but, to our knowledge, never had physical relations with a man.
Of course, as Melville and Abraham Lincoln attest, bachelors often slept together in the 19th Century as a matter of course. To be fair, Mr. Shandi-Tucci admits that he is not writing history or bound by facts. He makes no attempt to be objective.
The focus is also wide-ranging and by no means limited to Harvard. The two leading figures, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde,
only visited Harvard. The book is also very repetitive as figures appear and re-appear with the same details as before.
Most of the material is, moreover, based on secondary sources,
such as biographies of such figures at Newton Arvin, Truman Capote's lover and a professor at Smith, not Harvard.
The author, who has written a tour guide to Harvard, rambles around the Yard, Boston, New York, Provincetown, and various other places discussing personalities who had only the remotest connection with Fair Harvard. Indeed, the book reads like a cruizing guide to Harvard-connected bachelors, including professors, poets, musicians, athletes and millionaires. A perennial question is: what does this story or person have to do with Harvard? Certainly, the book is not a history of gay relationshps at Harvard, or how they changed over the generations. Much of the material on Boston bohemia sounds like it is recycled from the author's other writings. Many of the figures, however, are fascinating, such as Frank O'Hara, Leonard Bernstein, and F.O. Mathiessen.
In fact, the truth about male-to-male relationships at Harvard
in the past is clearly lost in the musty closets of Harvard Yard.
Mr. Shand-Tucci writes well, and maybe this is the best we will
ever get on a topic whose subjects, before Stonewall, with few exceptions, dared not speak its name.
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