Strange relations

In October 1960, James Baldwin and John Cheever spoke on a panel at San Francisco State College. The troubled state of American society was under discussion, which Baldwin incisively diagnosed as a 'failure of the masculine sensibility'. This book explores this crisis in mid-century masculinity and the lives and works of four bisexual writers who fought to express and embody alternate possibilities. Building on Walt Whitman's philosophy of the love between men, Webb considers the ways in which Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, as well as Cheever and Baldwin, resisted in their art, as well as in their relationships, and the damaging expectations of contemporary gender and sexuality. The author sheds new light on each writer. Together, they offer a powerful and moving argument for a transformative new masculinity, grounded in fluidity, love and intimacy.