Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/107
Marion Faye’s[1] note: Re: Teddy Pope,[2] he’s beautiful, the poor bastard. (Then an expansion of the note on the idea of how beautiful men go homo out of cowardice, because so much sex is open to them as heterosexuals and they have such sexual souls that they retreat into homosexuality where at least it can all go on underground.)
notes
- ↑ Mailer’s anti-hero for a post-Hiroshima world in The Deer Park, Faye (son of Dorothea O’Faye, a former singer who presides over a drunken salon in Desert D’Or, Mailer’s name for Palm Springs, California), is the archetypal hipster. A bisexual pimp and drug dealer, he is the novel’s dark conscience, the polar opposite of Charles Eitel. Mailer planned to use Faye as a centripetal character in the seven novels that he planned and failed to write as sequels to The Deer Park.
- ↑ In The Deer Park, a handsome gay actor who is forced to play straight, masculine roles by the homophobic Hollywood film industry. At one point, his producer, Herman Teppis, tries to force him to marry Lulu Meyers. Mailer admitted and rejected his earlier anti-gay bias in an essay, “The Homosexual Villain,” that he wrote shortly after completing The Deer Park for One: the Homosexual Magazine (January, 1955), rpt. Advertisements for Myself.
