Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy by Michael S. Sherry; The University of North Carolina Press; 292 pages; $29.95.

In 1974 Winston Leyland, the editor of Gay Sunshine, coined the phrase “Gay Cultural Renaissance” to describe the “rediscovery of the Gay Cultural heritage and its expression, especially since Stonewall, through art, music, literature, film, and in many other ways.”

Certainly the gay liberation movement has inspired a new generation of gay artists to come out as openly gay men and to produce art that honestly portrays the gay experience. However, in celebrating the “new gay artist,” post-Stonewall critics belittled the previous generations of gay artists. These after all were men who, while not “out” in our sense of the word, have made important contributions to American and world culture.

Indeed, it could be argued that gay American influence in the arts was at its peak in the decades before Stonewall. Their names are like a “Who’s Who” of 20^th century culture: Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein in classical music; Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter and Billy Strayhorn in popular music; Alvin Ailey, Jerome Robbins and Ted Shawn in dance; Edward Albee, William Inge and Tennessee Williams in drama; Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, and Langston Hughes in poetry; James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal in the novel.

To quote Christopher Reed, “a catalog of all twentieth-century artists who were or were thought to be homosexual, or who documented aspects of homosexuality in their work, or who reacted against associations of art and homosexuality by aggressive displays of homophobia or heterosexuality, would come close to a chronicle of twentieth-century U.S. art in its entirety.”

The gay minority’s predominance in the arts, and the straight majority’s reaction to it, is the topic of Gay Artists In Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy. Michael S. Sherry, who won a Bancroft Prize for The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, did not try to write a history of gay contributions to the arts. Nor does he relate the lives of the various artists, except in a chapter about composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981).

Rather, Sherry devotes most of his book to non-gay Americans and their mostly-hostile reaction to gay artists and their contributions, whether real or imagined. Sherry describes his book as “the biography of an idea – that gay people have a peculiar presence in the arts arising from their sinister and pathological ways, as many mid-century observers argued, or from their peculiar talent, as others have speculated, or from their ‘shared experience of anger or alienation,’ as [Edmund] White suggested.”

As David K. Johnson wrote in his excellent study of that era, post-World War II America went through a “Lavender Scare” that was as virulent as the concurrent “Red Scare.” Many lesbian, bisexual and gay people were persecuted by government and private agencies who thought American queers were a major part of the Soviet Fifth Column. To most Americans, gay artists were not brilliant creators who added to our culture, but sinister conspirators aimed at destroying our way of life.

They agreed with President Harry S. Truman, who warned that “all the ‘artists’ with a capital A, the parlor pinks and the soprano voiced men are banded together . . . I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.”

“Gay people,” Sherry notes, “were now seen as a systematic presence in most of the arts, not an exotic presence in a few, and they were linked to the nation’s survival and power, not just its moral health at home.”

The gay conspiracy in the arts was called the “homintern,” an obvious take on the Comintern, the international Communist organization bent on world domination. Like Communists hiding under America’s beds, members of the “homintern” concealed themselves in closets, not to protect themselves from bigots, but to plot the destruction of the good ole USA.