Why Norman Mailer Won’t Dance
Brandon Judell
 | This article was originally published on October 27, 1987 in The Advocate, 54–55. It is reprinted with the permission of Brandon Judell. |
In this past summer’s literary issue of Esquire, the editors provided a who’s who of writers in belles lettres, and at the top of the heap — above Walker Percy, Phillip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer — sat Norman Mailer. Mailer, most often described as a novelist, has actually written few novels. His first, the critically acclaimed The Naked and the Dead, brought the New Jersey boy instant fame and controversy, way back in 1948.
Since then Mailer seems to have spent more time publicizing his macho-to-the-nth-degree life style than on creating literature. He’s run unsuccessfully for the office of mayor of New York City, been divorced with some regularity, fought publicly with Gore Vidal, and published wordy studies on graffiti and on Marilyn Monroe. Mailer was also instrumental in having our “American Genet,” Jack Abbott, released from prison. The denouement of this well-publicized association was Abbot’s book The Belly of the Beast and his subsequent brutal murder of an innocent young man.
20th Century Culture, a consequential new reference tome, notes that
it is hard not to feel that Mailer is the most spectacular casualty, and the most representative figure, in postwar American literature. . . . He is never less than controversial, and seldom out of the public eye. Yet it is harder now . . . to believe that Mailer will produce a major work of imaginative literature.
Whether any of Mailer’s work proves of lasting value is for the children of our nephews and nieces to tell. But with the current release of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a movie directed by Mailer and based on his best-selling novel of the same name, this elder statesman’s view on homosexuality are revealed in all their gritty splendor.
The film chronicles the misadventures of one Tim Madden (Ryan O’Neal), a writer and convicted cocaine dealer, who wakes up one morning to find a tattoo on his arm, blood on the seat of his car, and two female heads in the hole where he stores his marijuana. An alcoholic, Tim can’t decide whether he killed the two women — one of whom is his wife, who left him for their black chauffeur — or if he is being set up.
So far, so good. But to help him figure out this quandary, Tim has a chat with his redneck father, who’s been rather worried that his offspring had been anally and orally violated in prison. We’ll quote from the book here:
[Tim]: “I took my three years in the slammer without a fall. They called me Iron Jaw. I wouldn’t take cock.”
[Dad]: “Good for you. I always wondered.”
[Tim]: “Hey, Dougy, what’s the virtue? What was I protecting? You’re an old line fanatic. You’d put all the faggots in concentration camps including your own son if he ever slipped. Just cause you were lucky enough to be born with tiger’s balls.”
[Dad]: “I think about faggots and you know what I believe? For half of them, it’s brave. For the wimps, it takes more guts to be queer than not. Otherwise they marry some little mouse who’s too timid to be a dyke and they both become psychologists and raise whiz kids to play electronic games. Turn queer, I say, if you’re a wimp. Have a coming-out party. It’s the others I condemn. The ones who ought to be men but couldn’t show the moxie.”
Tough Guys Don’t Dance also showcases a police chief who’d like to kill faggots, a lawyer — a possible bisexual — who’s either committed suicide in a car trunk or been murdered, and a very rich heir who had been seduced by his butler at age 14 and claims, “I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to regain property rights to my rectum.”
Confronted with these homophobic and self-hating characters, I went back to Mailer’s 1955 article “The Homosexual Villain,” which he rather bravely wrote for the historic gay magazine One. In it the author confronted his feelings about men who love other men: “I was never a roaring bigot, I did not go in for homosexual-bating, at least not face to face, and I never could stomach the relish with which soldiers would describe how they had stomped some faggot in a bar. I had, in short, the equivalent of a ‘gentleman’s anti-Semitism.’” Mailer goes on to state that reading Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America changed his views. “I can say for the first time I understood homosexual persecution to be a political act and a reactionary act, and I was properly ashamed of myself.”
The Advocate recently caught up with Mailer at a press event and asked if he had had a change of heart in the ’80s, or if we were just misunderstanding his prose. The author, now 64, is gray-haired and unrecognizable at first glance. Looking like the late Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion, he sat slouched in a chair with both hands buried deep in his pockets. His waist appeared to be struggling with his belt; his pajama-like shirt was cheerfully striped with blue, matching his overpowering irises. His demeanor, friendly to a degree, was that of one who has been over-interviewed. We persisted anyway.
So many of your characters in Tough Guys Don’t Dance are given antigay comments to voice. Your police chief even says he likes killing homos . . .
I’m smiling. I’m thinking of Richard Nixon, “I’m glad you brought that up.” Let me hear the entire question.
The father in the book says he’s glad wimps are homosexuals; it’s brave of them. What are you trying to say, Norman? Why are so many of your characters homophobic?
Are we talking about the movie or the novel? Because in the novel I go much more into it than in the movie. In the movie. . . . I’ve heard that accusation. It doesn’t make sense to me for the following reasons. First of all, none of my characters ever represent my point of view by themselves. I don’t have a character as a spokesman. But if I did have a character who stood there and said what I believe, it would hardly be Regency the police chief, would it? And it wouldn’t be the father. I’m not a man who spends his life working on the docks. I mean, the father is an old Irish ethnic and he’s a bigot. In fact, just as a sideline on this, at one point in the movie someone . . . well, we’ll skip the sideline. But the father has a point of view that is definitely anti-homosexual. He grew up that way. He’s drenched in it. The son has a much more sophisticated point of view.
The son says at one point to his father, “All right. They didn’t make a punk out of me.” Well, in prisons that’s the law of life in prison. I’m merely describing the reality there. Going to prison and getting out without being raped is equal to someone else today getting a Magna in Harvard on his thesis. It’s not easy. You’re a young good-looking man and you go into prison, you can get raped. And that’s not fun. And it’s a matter of great pride to guys who’s been in prison that they don’t get raped. That was not an antihomosexual remark in and of itself. In fact, the son says to him, “You’d put homosexuals in concentration camps.” So the son’s separating himself from that.
It seemed to me that the core of the homosexual aspect of the film is Wardley, who’s a very complex man. He’s bisexual. And he and Madden have a rather tender relationship. The greatest exchange of love in the film is at the very end of the film for Wardley when he commits suicide and Tim feels for him and is tender toward him. I don’t see where the film is homophobic?
Accepting that the film is not antigay, why do the characters seem to be antigay?
Well, I like that. One because I like to get a little more of attitude into films. I hate that kind of general liberality that we have now in films where you can’t anything bad about any nationality, any group. I think that at this pont now, minority prejudice is not a major element in American life any more. I think we have other problems that are much deeper. I think if we air it a little bit, there’s no great . . . characters can embody points of view that are antipathetic.
Are these attitudes mouthed by your heterosexuals something you still hear in everyday life?
No, I think the old-fashioned antihomosexual attitude really phased out over the last ten of 15 years. AIDS, of course, will bring in a new set of problems. But in brief, because we can’t talk about this any longer than this, I don’t see the film as homophobic. It has characters in it who are homophobic but that’s not the same thing.
Do you think that this film is a faithful depiction of what’s happening in America?
It’s a fevered dream of what’s happening in America. It’s an exaggeration. It’s the exaggeration that art permits, but I wouldn’t call it an accurate portrait of life in America now. Not everybody in America after all is selling cocaine and cheating on their husband and wife and cutting off heads. No, it’s an exaggeration. But film by its essence is an exaggeration.
Are the women in your film your response to feminist stances?
No, I like the women in the film. I think women today are very strong — I think they’re too strong. All they do is complain about how weak they are and all the while they are getting stronger and stronger. Once they are physically stronger than we are, what are we going to become? They’ll ship us out to the moon. There’ll be colonies of men on the moon.
That’s all. Nobody’s ever said this but it’s a terrifying thought. You see whatever indignities men ever visited upon women, they always had to keep women alive and in great numbers because women were necessary to men to continue. But men are not necessary to women to continue. They can keep about 20 guys alive and just have sperm banks all over the world and they can kill off the rest of the men. Think of it. It’s frightening to men. We’re living on women’s mercy.
We were told that once when asked at a party about why you have so many references to anal sex in your work, you responded, “We’re always fascinated about things we know we’ll never do.” Is this a true anecdote?
No, I never said that. I might have been asked the question, but I wouldn’t have given that answer.
The author then quickly rose and headed for another interview elsewhere in his publicist’s apartment, thereby denying us his answers to our soon-to-be-asked questions on such things as male-to-male fellatio, the copious gay sex in his Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings, and how anyone with an ounce of social awareness could feel antigay sentiment has died down in America. But no doubt there will be a next time.