Toole and Van Cleve's Assessment of his Homosexuality

During academic year 2016-2017, I had as a colleague Stewart Van Cleve, author of the book Land of Ten Thousand Loves, a History of Queer Minnesota. He had spent a great deal of time studying the LGBTQ archives at the University of Minnesota, and he had used that collection extensively to write his book. I posed to him the question of John Kennedy Toole's sexual orientation. Here is what I took away from that conversation. If I mischaracterize what he said, that is my error.

To preface this, I have to say that I have not studied the current theoretical framework for LGBTQ studies. At one point, I thought that any man who had sex with other men would be called "gay." Now as I understand it that is not the case. Van Cleve indicated that the current umbrella term for all sexual behavior that is not heteronormative is "queer," which used to be a slur people avoided. Gay is apparently a public identity, and to be accurate, one can use the phrase "men who have sex with other men" to describe the behavior.

I explained to Van Cleve that two inexperienced researchers had written the book Ignatius Rising, published by Louisiana State University Press. In that book, they stated that they had found some individuals who reported knowing Toole and that those individuals knew that he had had sex with other men. That book has been attacked by several individuals who were close to Toole on several grounds. First, the critics charged that the authors had not handled primary sources correctly. They may have taken passages of letters out of context, and they several times did not get permission to quote letters. Second, the persons they found who claimed to knowledge about Toole's sexual behavior were criticized as being the sort of people who might make things up to get attention. They were deemed unreliable. LSU Press stood by the book, despite the criticism.

Van Cleve referenced a book called Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. He explained that especially in the South, there is a long tradition of men who compartmentalized their sexuality. They did not see themselves as gay, but in one compartment of their lives they had sex with other men. New Orleans Carnival encourages people to compartmentalize behavior. What happens during Carnival doesn't count toward who you see yourself as. Again, the term gay is a public identity, rather than a description of behavior. So I posed the question, "Does that mean that we can doubt the accuracy and conclusions of Ignatius Rising?" He indicated that we probably should not reject the book, based on my summary of the situation.

I have until now I have kept my distance from Ignatius Rising and have treated the issue of whether Toole had sex with other men as an open question about which one could not be certain. Based on the opinion of someone who has expertise in the field, I now conclude that it is more likely than not that he did have sex with other men, however you label the behavior, although there still exists the possibility that in fact he did not have sex with other men.

Postscript

This question of how we label and think about John Kennedy Toole gets us into a philosophical exploration of the underpinnings of the historical disciplines. Do the dead have a right to privacy? What is the purpose of historical inquiry anyway? Plutarch, in the beginning of his collection of biographies, stated that each of his stories had a moral. In each case there was a reason that he was writing about the individual in question. When I read that, I thought, yes, but what if further investigation reveals that the subject turned out not to exemplify the moral Plutarch had chosen? What if new evidence shows that Caesar or Cato was completely different than Plutarch wanted him to be? In our own country, what if the DNA proves that Thomas Jefferson really had fathered children by one of his African American slaves, despite the vigorous denials of his supporters? What does that fact do to our understanding of Jefferson?

We live in an era when the dominant social value is to learn about someone, flaws and all. So at funerals, family and friends will get up to reminisce about the departed, even if the memories are a bit embarrassing. My father grew up in a different era, and his father was a funeral director. My father once said, "Well, it was a good thing they brought in a minister who didn't know the man, so that he could say with a straight face that the deceased had been a wonderful person who would be missed." Dignity and respectability were much more important than historical accuracy.

It is clear that Toole was very private about his life. On top of that, according to Joel Fletcher, Toole's mother curated his legacy and selectively weeded the papers that made it into his archival collection. Perhaps also many of his old friends and colleagues do not wish him to be thought of as different than he presented himself. But flawed as it is, the evidence within Ignatius Rising does have to be taken seriously and not dismissed. Unless we just want to give the man his privacy and with it some dignity.

Even giving him his privacy comes with a certain irony. The main character of Confederacy struggles on the edge of respectability and cannot attain it, and fans of the book love Ignatius in part due to his lack of dignity. The humor in the book is disparaging, though not mean-spirited. Many aspects of Ignatius are modeled on Bobby Byrne, whose dignity suffered from the book. Considering that the book is about celebrating the people of New Orleans warts and all, one can argue that it is out of keeping with Toole's own ethos to afford him too much dignity.

Post-postscript

Another thing that Mr. Van Cleve mentioned was that A Confederacy of Dunces was one of his favorite books. I had always wondered how members of the gay community felt about the book, considering that there are stereotyped and caricatured LGBTQ characters in the book. With a sample size of exactly one person, the book is not rejected by the gay community.