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having a great appetite for every activity
—
eating, drinking,
gambling, riding, fornicating; this voracity suggests the aggressive
rapacity of military manhood. Known around the stables as “The
Buffalo . . . because when in the saddle he slumped his great heavy
shoulders and lowered his head” (McCullers, 2001c: 323),
Langdon is described as virile, agile, and hulky. Compared with
Langdon’s excellent horsemanship, Captain Penderton is no rider
at all. The soldiers snicker at him and give him the nickname
“Captain Flap-Fanny” because when viewed from behind, “his
buttocks spread and jounced flabbily in the saddle” (323).
Penderton’s flabby, soft butt is vividly contrasted with Langdon’s
impenetrable, taut body. In her feminization of Penderton’s butt,
McCullers hints at his unorthodox sexuality. In fact, his marriage
to Leonora seems to be an arranged one of appearances due to his
latent homosexuality. As McCullers writes, when Leonora
“married the Captain she had been a virgin. Four nights after her
wedding she was still a virgin, and on the fifth night her status was
changed only enough to leave her somewhat puzzled” (318).
Heteronormativity underpins the concept of masculinity and,
particularly in the Army, sustains the ideal of warrior masculinity
that excludes nonnormative masculinities.
6
In “Pleasures and Dangers of Shame,” queer scholar Michael
6
See Michael Warner’s discussion of the heteronormative in
The Trouble with
Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
(2000)
.
For discussions of
World War II and American psychiatry’s joint effort with army to discriminate
against homosexuals, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman’s
Intimate
Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(1988: 288-291). However, repression
breeds resistance. Despite military psychiatrists’ prejudiced definitions of
homosexuality in the 1940s, World War II also created an encouraging setting for
a generation of young Americans to experience same-sex love and to participate
in the emergence of a gay subculture. For many gay men, the military indeed
provided entry into a world suffused with same-sex relationships. As D’Emilio
and Freedman claim, “World War II was something of a nationwide ‘coming out’
experience” (1988: 289). D’Emilio’s another book,
Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities
(1983), also supplies a helpful analysis of the lesbian and gay
movement in the U.S. from World War II to the historic Stonewall Riots.