Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  4 Becoming alien, becoming homosexual: From cyptography to cartography

  “Under the Hollywood Sign,” I think, is a perfect example of that one quadruple somersault from the highest bars that Tom could manage again and again, but which Reamy-clones never seem able to pull off. In this piece, as I say, we can hear the singular voice of Tom Reamy, singing a dangerous song of primal fears so deep and yet so commonplace that we automatically reject them, precisely because they may be universally shared. No one likes to imagine him- or herself as a potential point-beast ready to run with the slavering pack.—Harlan Ellison, “Introduction” to San Diego Lightfoot Sue. (xiii)

  I want to turn in this section of my essay to a story that was first published in 1975 and that was not, I suspect, read at the time as primarily a gay text or a text about either homosexuals or homosexuality, Tom Reamy’s “Under the Hollywood Sign.” Reamy died in 1977, at the age of 42, having published only a handful of sf stories and one novel, Blind Voices (1978), that is more horror than sf. Reading between the lines of Harlan Ellison’s introduction to the posthumous collection of Reamy’s short stories, San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories, I deduce that Reamy was probably gay himself. If not, it is evident in the stories—especially “Under the Hollywood Sign” and “San Diego Lightfoot Sue” (which won the 1975 Nebula Award for best novelette)—that he was remarkably familiar with the gay idiom of the time. Either way, it doesn’t matter a great deal, since a text’s queerness cannot be said to reside in the sexual identity of its author. Yet having said this, I am aware of having, yet again, opened up the question of the ways in which “queer” can be construed variously as belonging to, being seen in, or being read into the text, the author, or the reading. “Under the Hollywood Sign,” for all its being, I suspect, relatively unknown within the world of sf criticism, may prove a particularly fruitful (and, yes, the pun is deliberate) example of the ways in which queer theory can effect a re-reading—and not just of the text, but also, perhaps, of the heteronormative reading protocols that have constrained earlier readings. In this case, I will be reading “Under the Hollywood Sign” in part for its peculiarly (un)faithful reiteration of the trope of the invisible alien; as such, I will be reading it against the ghosts of earlier readings—difficult as those traces are to discern—both of the story itself and of that other story I have set up here as exemplary of the trope, Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”

  “Under the Hollywood Sign” tells the story, in first person narration, of a self-identified heterosexual LA cop, Lou Rankin, who sees and becomes obsessed with a group of near-identical and extraordinarily beautiful redheaded young men who lurk in the background of vehicle crashes and other sites of lethal violence (and who are, in the end, revealed as aliens who feed on the life energies of dying humans). Invisible to everyone else, the young men exert a peculiar fascination on Rankin, to the extent that he eventually kidnaps one of them and takes him to a borrowed cabin in the foothills. There he chains the young man up and attempts to make some sort of contact with him. These attempts consist at first of highly unsatisfactory question and answer sessions; after three weeks, the narrator resorts to a violence that quickly becomes sexualized. It soon becomes apparent, however, even to the narrator, that the young man is not remotely what he seems. In fact, the narrator has interrupted some form of alien life cycle, which results in the stillbirth of a winged creature described (as the young man had earlier been) in terms reminiscent of traditional depictions of angels. After the death, the narrator returns to LA, where he finds his partner’s wife, whose sexual attentions he’s been trying to avoid, hiding in his apartment. The partner, Carnehan, turns up while they’re having (reluctant, on the narrator’s part) sex, kills the wife, knocks out the narrator, drives him to the Hollywood Hills, and eventually dumps him out on the hillside under the Hollywood sign, shoots him in the gut, and leaves him to die. Unable to acknowledge that he’s dying, the narrator attempts to crawl to safety—only to look up and find himself surrounded by four more of the beautiful red-headed young men who “look at [him] the same way Carnehan looks at an apple he’s been saving for a special occasion” (66).

  From the very first sentence—“I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I noticed him” (40)—the story foregrounds the paradox that these exceptionally beautiful, and therefore one would think noticeable, young men are visible only to the narrator. Part of the crowd of gawkers around the site of a nasty traffic accident, the young man is seen, apparently, only by Rankin. The narrator makes three specific observations: first, that he has been seeing but not seeing the young man: “I suppose I had been subliminally aware of him for some time” (40). Then, he notes that the young man does not react the same way as the rest of the crowd: “That’s one of the reasons I noticed him in particular. He wasn’t wearing that horrified, fascinated expression they all seem to have. He might have been watching anything—or nothing” (40). And finally, the narrator makes an observation that situates the story firmly within the realm of the sexual, although he does so by denying that very interpellation: “Don’t get the wrong idea—my crotch doesn’t get tight at the sight of an attractive young man. But there’s only one word to describe him—beautiful” (41).

  The story thus circulates from the beginning around three related issues: the question of visibility, as it is expressed through the narrator’s ability to see the aliens; the sexual identity of the narrator, who, although self-identified as heterosexual, has an immediate and overwhelming sexual response to the aliens; and the identity of the aliens themselves, which is only slowly unveiled, as the objects of the narrator’s gaze slip from an initial identification as beautiful young men to a sense that there is something profoundly different about them to the final revelation that they are, in fact, an entirely alien lifeform—or, to be more precise, that they represent a stage, a kind of chrysalis, in a profoundly alien lifecycle that has nothing at all to do with human wants, desires, or identities. Because the aliens are never explained—never even overtly identified within the story as aliens—the story hesitates on the borderline between sf and fantasy/horror: a scientific explanation would tip it one way, a supernatural one would tip it the other. Furthermore, there is a marked refusal within the text to make a definitive pronouncement on the issue of the narrator’s sexual identity. Instead, the text plays with conventional notions of homosexual/heterosexual difference, never fully locating the narrator at a specific point on the psychosexual map of the homo-hetero divide. It does so, furthermore, within the framework of an outlaw cryptography, a series of codings, of in-jokes, that are only indeterminately available to the presumed heterosexual audience of sf. How many straight readers, I wonder, were familiar in the late 70s with The Advocate, the US national gay magazine in which, among other things, Pat Califia gave explicit sexual advice to gay men?

  In 1984, on the only occasion that I have taught “Under the Hollywood Sign” to my science fiction course—it has since gone out of print—I found my students divided into two distinct camps: on the one hand, the majority, who saw only the most obvious signs of queerness in the text, assumed that, had the story really been about homosexuality, it would have been expressed by some other metaphor; on the other hand, I had several students from the nearby Bible College in the class, for whom the story was, it appeared, perfectly clear. Fundamentalists to the core, these particular students objected vehemently to the story’s inclusion on the syllabus, claiming that it was both pornographic and blasphemous. Both responses exemplify particular cultural assumptions about the representation of homosexuality in literature—the one, used to a reading protocol founded on assumptions of universality and “Truth,” finds the homosexuality in the story insufficient in itself, so that it must be about something more “universal,” which is inevitably then something more heterosexual; the other, used to a reading protocol that weighs everything against the “literal Truth” of the Bible, reads (and judges) the story against both a particular moral standard and a partic
ular iconography, in which an angel, for example, can only be an angel and a homosexual can only be evil. Both interpretations locate the story at specific, albeit different, positions on the cultural map, positions which say a great deal about our sociocultural beliefs about queerness, if very little about queerness itself—or about the text.

  As an intervention into or a rewriting of the story that reveals the menace of the alien passing invisibly amongst us, “Under the Hollywood Sign” reverses many of the standard tropes that inform “Who Goes There?” The monstrosity of these aliens, if it exists at all, resides not in their deformity, their ugliness, or their insatiable appetite for conquest; however, although these aliens are, by human standards, extraordinarily beautiful—“all the artists for the last thousand years have been trying to paint that face on angels, but their fumbling attempts never came close” (54)—they are not necessarily “good.” As it becomes clear that the aliens need to feed on the life-energy of dying creatures in order to complete their metamorphosis (into winged beings who are even more obviously angel-like than their “human” forms), it becomes equally clear that they are somehow causing the sudden increase in human deaths. As Cunningham, the pretty cop who is normally on “Pansy Patrol,” says to the narrator: “What got into people last night, anyway? Seems like everybody was trying to get themselves killed” (52). Thus, while the alien of “Who Goes There?” is never figured as anything but monstrous evil, the aliens in Reamy’s story are much more morally ambiguous. Furthermore, because, on the one hand, they are marked as “queer” by the text—compared with the “pretty boys” in the gay bars, as well as to Cunningham and even to Rankin’s partner, Carnehan, in a reproduction of the stereotype that certain men are too beautiful to be straight—and, on the other hand, they are marked as angelic and described in terms of a kind of beautiful neutrality, as if they are above the pettiness of human concerns, these aliens are only ambiguously interpellated as either monsters or angels. Metonymically, they fail to serve as warnings of the invisible “passing” Other, whether communist or homosexual, since not only does the text provide the reader with no clear way to judge the relative value of a human life against the birth of an alien/angel, but the narrator’s remorse at the winged creature’s death and his comparison of the angelic disinterested beauty of the alien with the fleshy demands of Carnehan’s wife suggest that the aliens/Others may be the true norm against whom humans, the not-Other, are revealed as lacking.

  In addition, the text’s refusal to disambiguate Rankin’s overt sexual attraction to the apparently male aliens (they have penises, but use them neither to urinate nor for sex) and his repeated assertion of himself as a heterosexual man, call into question the very heterosexual/homosexual dyad by which our century has come to understand and to differentiate forms of sexual attraction.22 At the same time, both the style of narration, reminiscent both of hard-boiled detective stories and of the “lean, muscular, supple” prose of Tiptree, and Rankin’s position as a cop mark him as clearly male, disrupting the presupposition that effeminacy is a prerequisite for the experience of masculine same-sex desire. The text does not disallow the reading that suggests that Rankin has been, all along, a repressed homosexual; however, by making the discourse of repression overt in the conversations between the cops, and specifically between Cunningham, of “Pansy Patrol” fame, and the police psychologist, the text suggests both that such a repression is universal—Cunningham suggests the psychologist is gay, Carnehan reads The Advocate, the narrator concludes that Cunningham probably is gay—and that it is inadequate to explain either the specificity of the narrator’s desire for the aliens or the extent of his obsession. In constructing Rankin as the most masculine of men, the cop, the story also reveals the curious imbrication of the police, especially the vice squad, with their prey—pretty Cunningham goes out on “Pansy Patrol” with a padded crotch, Carnehan chuckles over an anti-cop joke in a gay magazine, both Cunningham and the narrator reveal an obsession with penis size, and all of them are familiar with the bars and restaurants, with the gestures and idiom of the gay subculture. Masculinity, it would seem, does not automatically equate to heterosexuality. Furthermore, the very location of the story in LA, where everyone’s first reaction, when the narrator asks if they’ve seen the aliens, is to talk about actors, grounds the story within a notion of performance: under the Hollywood sign, masculinity is most obviously a role played with varying degrees of verisimilitude. Or, as Judith Butler notes in “Critically Queer”:

  [i]nsofar as heterosexual gender norms produce inapproximable ideals, heterosexuality can be said to operate through the regulated production of hyperbolic versions of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ These are for the most part compulsory performances, ones which none of us choose, but which each of us is forced to negotiate. (22)

  As with “Who Goes There?,” the construction of the masculine as the object of the gaze creates a profound uneasiness. Rankin’s ability to see the aliens is nearly indecipherable from his desire for them, a desire which is figured nearly as much in terms of wanting to see and to be seen, to be acknowledged, as it is in overtly sexual terms. After he rapes the alien for the first time, Rankin holds the alien’s face and forces him to respond, to be present:

  “Don’t hide from me. It doesn’t do any good. I can see you. I can see you!” He swam to the surface and looked at me. “Did you enjoy it? Did you even feel it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it feel good? Did it hurt?”

  “Yes.” (60)

  The alien’s responses to the narrator’s questions, as to his actions, settle nothing. On the one hand, they can be interpreted within the standard conventions of pornographic writing, in which the description of anal penetration in terms of “hurts so good” has become a cliché; on the other hand, they indicate the alien’s near-complete disengagement with anything human, as he strives to complete his birth. The alien’s transformation, the end of his life cycle, produces a moment of cognitive dissonance that resonates both in terms of sf and in terms of the deconstruction of our assumptions about gender and sexuality, as this apparent male quite literally attempts to give birth, an attempt that fails only because the narrator has prevented the alien from gathering enough life energy—an intervention which the narrator sees as tragic, but which, ironically, has no doubt saved the lives of humans.

  It is possible then to read “Under the Hollywood Sign” as a text in the process of becoming queer; initially accessible through a kind of outlaw cryptography, the signs by which its queerness are produced have become more familiar to the “general population” through the proliferation of a visible gay and lesbian subject. It has become harder for the reader, however attached ideologically to a heteronormative reading protocol, to dismiss anything queer within texts as “a rag of extraneous meaning that had got stuck onto them” (Sinfield 63).23 Consequently, a queer reading of Reamy’s story might chart the movement from cryptography to cartography, from decoding a text whose signification is only apparent to the chosen few to locating its insights into the sexual epistemology of the culture on the map of our own sexual ontologies. Thus, both the narrator and the object of his obsession remain, in a sense, indeterminate within the text itself: it is through our reading that the narrator becomes homosexual (or not), just as it is through our reading that the beautiful young men become either aliens or angels. The quality of their otherness can only be understood as a doubling effect, just as the queerness of the text depends on the reader’s particular subject position and willingness to indulge in different reading protocols. The alien/Others are both ineluctably masculine and, like Tiptree him/herself, not masculine at all, since the mere fact of their otherness equates them synecdochically with the female, the black, the queer. As Jackson suggests, the subject of the sf story is “not the cause but the effect of the system that sustains it” (102); in “Under the Hollywood Sign,” the narrator’s subjectivity is an identity-in-process, an effect of a system that can be variously understood, depe
nding on one’s worldview. In the end then, I locate the text’s queerness not in a determination that the narrator is gay, because he desires and finally rapes the alien, but rather because the text itself calls into question the very system which effects the narrator as a gay subject.

  5 Conclusion: An alien cartography

  A text’s subversive potential is not dependent upon its generic innovation, but on how it maps and motivates the antagonisms constituting the subject(s) of representation, and on how it transfigures and recathects the available forms of cultural expression. . . . This rewriting is coextensive to the articulation of gay male identities-in-process as these deviant subjects confront culture and enter into representational agency within it. The most radical representational practices of deviant subjects not only challenge the official versions of their lives, but also transvalue the notion of deviance, and interrogate the mechanisms and meanings of representational practices—including their own.—Earl Jackson, Jr., Strategies of Deviance (44)