Antisemitism as Insight into Homophobia

• In Event: Activism, Allyship, Appropriation, Erasure: Representing Others in North American Jewish Literature

Abstract

A generation after her most famous novel, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) was published, Laura Z. Hobson made an important contribution to American gay literature. Published in 1975, Hobson’s seventh novel, Consenting Adult, told the story of a Jewish mother, her gentile husband, and their gay son. In 1985, Consenting Adult became a popular made-for-television film, starring Marlo Thomas and Martin Sheen. Like Gentleman’s Agreement, with its novel and cinematic version, Consenting Adult was the kind of social message story that seemed designed to be told to the American public through multiple media. Although Hobson could not have known it in 1944 when she began writing Agreement, her focus on antisemitism revealed a concern for the treatment of marginalized and persecuted groups that would eventually extend to the treatment of young gay men. This arc of Hobson’s interests in social issues that were rarely discussed in polite conversation suggest Hobson’s status as an “activist writer” in the mold of a Betty Friedan – highlighting issues that, like “the problem that had no name,” in the case of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, had not received adequate public attention. In Gentleman’s Agreement, Hobson’s focus was on non-violent American antisemitism – the kind of bigotry and discrimination that had become not just accepted, but expected in everyday American life. In CA, that interest in shining light on the private suffering of persecuted groups turned to young gay men and their straight families. Significantly, in CA, Hobson’s use of an interfaith married couple (Jeff’s mother is Jewish; his father is a WASP), demonstrates how the Jewish experience of antisemitism could influence a straight parent to adopt more enlightened attitudes toward a gay son.

In this paper, I examine how these two novels (GA and CA) fit into Hobson’s arc of writerly interests. The connection between these two topics can be broadly explained as Hobson’s concern for marginalized groups in the US and their relationship to the liberalization of American culture. In the late 1940s, Jews were the first notable group in a series of marginalized groups to be integrated into mainstream society. Members of the LGBTQ community would go through a parallel process of integration almost seventy years later.

Author

• Rachel Gordan, University of Florida