REACTING TO AN ESSAY ABOUT JOHN WAYNE
The alignment of gender stereotypes in America was strong during WWII. Men went to war. Boot camp taught you how to do that. Women stayed home and had babies however they could. But then the war ended and as though braced against a strong wind, we nearly fell over.
We hardly dared confront how many war racketeers had made fortunes. The exhausted men were confounded by the strong women who were told to quit their jobs and be compliant. The children who grew up without real family went delinquent with “juvie” substituting for boot camp. I grew up looking carefully at the photos in Life and Look, watching newsreel loops, and sneaking my father’s “Police Gazette” demonizing Nazis. Nothing was so eloquent as the faces of the real soldiers. How was it that I deserved such sacrifice? Look how much they loved each other.
Cultural configuration is easy to see developing when we’re looking at history, but it’s harder when it’s presently everywhere or quietly developing somewhere unknown. Once the pattern becomes clear, it seems to be inevitable. By now a half-dozen new major forces have hit us, including again war as has since Gilgamesh and Beowulf raised up a yearning for a masterful hero. Also the Internet, global interweaving, and the Pill. Control of reproductive issues has become a particular battleground, since it had been a potent way to control the system.
In the Fifties my imagination — like everyone else’s — was seized by Westerns with strong male leads and jocular camaraderie among cowboys. Then I read “Summer and Smoke” and all that Western stuff was pushed off to background. When I innocently turned in a book report on “S and S”, my English teacher looked at me shrewdly and asked, “Do you really understand this?” I sort of did. But I wanted to really know. Tennessee Williams was shifting the gender rules by recognizing the reality of social sex constriction. There was more than “The Quiet Man” dominating the tempestuous Maureen O’Hara.
People think that because I’m unattached, I must be lesbian. It’s a cultural imperative to be attached. I prefer the term “queer” since I see “gay” and “lesbian” as unimaginative reversals of the usual male and female rules. I’m not defined by who turns me on or how to express it. I’m busy and celibate, so gender stereotypes are irrelevant.
Jonathan Poletti’s review of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez dissects the tangle of presentations that our culture has become. Here I thought it was Jews who ran Hollywood and all the time it was Gays! No wonder all the kissing was properly puckered up and married people had single beds. Manliness with no sex. These people must be virtuous.
Poletti’s summary essay is called “Queering John Wayne.” https://medium.com/queertheory/queering-john-wayne-10c5cdb2cb81 The many photos included are important, showing the pretty youngster named “Marion” as a kid before Ford made him into an icon with deep cuffs to his jeans and a rolling walk. The story is not quite so dramatic as Rock Hudson’s since the latter had both AIDS and Elizabeth Taylor.
Wayne’s portrayal of Rooster Cogburn was memorialized in a heroic-sized statue of Wayne in the role that was commissioned by Hustler and put outside the publication’s building. When they sold the building and moved, the new owners had a problem. The statue interfered with their image. It’s gone but I’m unclear where it went. I’m pretty sure it has not suffered the dramatic fate of the Confederate hero statues. Maybe that’s why its location is not noted. Even the Autry Museum didn’t want it.
The sculptor was Harry Jackson, who is hard to classify from any point of view. As a combat artist, he suffered brain damage and subsequent seizures. He was married five times and attracted strong supporters. For the rich patrons at the Buffalo Bill Museum, he sang salty songs while playing the guitar. For some listeners he claimed to be born in a bordello, the son of one of the professionals who was the daughter of the madam, and left when his grandmother asked him to kill his mother. In some contexts this would help sales — in other circles not. He came to visit us in Browning and remained a friend. He was full of possibility.
Western art was a great cover for those who were sexually turned on by men, particularly Indians wearing mostly skin, which are not considered in this article. The actual Western men in question — big intelligent men who took charge — were more likely ranchers and around Browning were likely to have come back from the war to marry Blackfeet women who owned land. They stayed in their roles and succeeded at them. Their descendants, not so much. Times change.
But the most problematic type in ranch country was transient, the near “metrosexuals” who constantly toured through in the name of galleries and auctions and who often wrote books about the accoutrements of the image. They loved knowing about guns, though they weren’t shooters. They ran publishing houses, historical journals, private collections, lifestyle magazines. Their final depictions made a LOT of money. I suspect that’s where Charlie Russell’s fortune eventually went. Check out the U of Oklahoma.
One of the most popular of my posts on my previous blog was “Tom Selleck’s Wardrobe”. It began with his elegant “Western” outfits in “Quigley Down Under” and ended with him teasing in a Speedo.
https://prairiemary.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Wardrobe+of+Tom+Selleck
Australia has picked up the Western trope so well that “Mystery Road” is an excellent example and it took an Australian actor to lead “Longmire.” Long landscape and strong men were never about cows.
In the Sixties with Bob Scriver in Browning, gay men were always showing up and sticking around a while. Bob claimed he knew nothing about such a thing as men who were attracted to men, and certainly it never held him back from pursuing women. But after I wrote “Bronze Inside and Out,” a few people almost sneeringly (because they felt they knew more than me) told me about him attending “smokers” featuring boxers in Great Falls.
At NU (‘57–’61), the love of Tennessee Willams plays was a tie among me, a few other women, and a group of the aspiring actors and directors who didn’t quite know they were gay. Some were not. I realize I was often a “beard,” a disguise posing as a date, even while student teaching at Evanston High School. Laird Williamson was also student teaching and we had done TW scenes in acting class. Our supervising teacher was gay. We went out as a threesome — for ice cream. It was a covert network, something like the fine young black acting students who supported each other in spite of unlikely prospects. I’m saying “homosexuality” was everywhere but unacknowledged so as to get on with things.
Being different, as in “queer” which may just be “odd,” compresses people into connections like gay John Ford that confer power and drive, more easily seen in the arts, but also in politics. When the connections are identified and made public, it changes our whole understanding of ourselves. Some become terrified, others become stars.
This doesn’t surprise those who accept the present and scientifically buttressed idea that a human is a trajectory of complexities and potentials acting within the circumstances of time and place. This revelation conflicts with that of the Evangelicals who insist that God chose them, directed them to dominate everyone, and required them to obey a divine rule book so as to get rich. No wonder they try to control even the imaginary movies. But the John Waynes of the world persist.
