The Gays and the Gaze: Paul Cadmus and his Subversive Masculinities
Words by Myfanwy Greene
‘Sordid’, ‘disreputable,’ ‘disgraceful’ and ‘drunken’ [1] are just some of the words that have been used to describe Paul Cadmus’ paintings. Cadmus’ paintings were intentional disruptions of the social norm and his paintings are important representations of queer and ‘subversive’ masculinity in the interwar period. I use the word ‘subversive’ as it will define all representations of masculinity that undermine the structures of traditional, hegemonic masculinity – particularly the sailor masculinity of the interwar period in the USA. Paul Cadmus satirises traditional masculinity by presenting it as imbued with queerness and uses the figure of the ‘floosie’ to expose its vulnerability, absurdity and fickleness. Through Cadmus’ presentation of the male body and the viewer’s gaze in his two paintings The Fleet’s In! (1934) and Sailors and Floosies (1938), the essay will examine how subversive his masculinities truly were. Lastly, it will explore the controversy which Cadmus’ works caused, and some of the censorship and outrage surrounding his paintings.
‘Fairy’, ‘Floosie’, Fantasy: Queer Representations
In The Fleet’s In! the sailors are presented as lascivious, indulgent and obnoxious. They interact crudely with prostitutes, and the painting is heavy with desire and eroticism, emphasized by its dynamism and vivid colour. Cadmus’ characters are spooky, grotesque, heavily made-up and oddly proportioned – giving the painting a very performative and self-aware sense of satire. The sailors tease and leer at the prostitutes, their crotches heavily emphasized, their movements exaggerated, several of them clearly intoxicated. Upon first glance, this representation of masculinity appears hegemonic, as the sexually repressed returning sailor was almost expected to overindulge in sex and alcohol. Beth Genné highlights that,
‘the sailor “costume” (and the institution it signified) … in a sense, gave the character license for otherwise unacceptable public behavior, especially during the war and immediate postwar years. The sailor on leave was treated indulgently by a public that saw him as a cultural hero, a guardian of the nation.’ [2]
The sailor costume acts as an excuse to behave in whatever way the sailor desired, although, when Cadmus actually went to the lengths to depict their deplorable behaviour, the grotesqueness of this behaviour is starkly revealed.
Paul Cadmus, The Fleet’s In!, 1934, Tempera on Canvas. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, Navy Art Collection.
Queer figures appear to threaten the hegemonic masculinities of Cadmus’ sailors in both painting, most often through sexual opportunism. In The Fleet’s In! a blond man (far left) is clearly wearing make-up and offers a cigarette to the sailor to his right. Greedily and intimately, the sailor accepts, staring into the man’s eyes. Scholar Richard Meyer has noted that the blond man is a traditional representation of the ‘fairy’, an archetype of a gay man, as he has ‘feminine characteristics’ and possesses queer signifiers of the 1920s-30s – his red tie. [3] The sailor’s acceptance of the cigarette is thus not simply friendly, but in fact a suggestion that he may want to accept more from the ‘fairy’ after the cigarette. Such sexually suggestive undertones as these are heavily present throughout Cadmus’ works, and they critique the hegemonic masculinity in the period by highlighting ‘the blatant homophobia of the 1930s’, when the link between virility and heterosexuality was broadly considered the norm. [4] In Cadmus’ presentations of intimacy between two men, he scrutinizes the malleability of heterosexual masculinity.
In Sailors and Floosies, the ‘floosie’ figures are the ones to threaten the hegemonic masculinities’ of the sailors. The painting’s central ‘floosie’ is heavily made-up, dressed provocatively in red, and leans menacingly over the young, blond sailor, a sly grin across her face. To the left, a ‘floosie’ wearing a comically phallic head piece sits in the grasp of a young ginger sailor, his face flushed with desperation, pain and desire – a vulnerable state. Lastly, the final ‘floosie’ has her sailor pressed up against a tree in the background, as he grimaces grotesquely. The three ‘floosie’ figures are presented as sirens – monsters who have drawn these young, lonely men in with their overt sexuality and alluring drag-style makeup. I would go as far to say that there are undertones of other classical monsters like Medusa in the floosies, as the two to the left are with sailors who have their eyes closed, and the grimacing sailor looks as though he may literally have been turned to stone - gray and stiff. The stiffness, the phallic headpiece and the overall composition of the painting all serve to emasculate the sailors, who are vulnerable to the more powerful characters of the ‘floosies’. In this painting, the ‘floosie’ femininity subverts hegemonic masculinity. Cadmus presents the sailors’ masculinities as totally vulnerable to the dominant sexuality of the ‘floosie’ – the young men appear to be being preyed on by the prostitutes.
Paul Cadmus, Sailors and Floosies, 1938. Oil and tempera on linen. The Whitney Museum of American Art.
There is much to say on the social commentary in Sailors and Floosies, shown by the motifs on the outer edges of the piece. In the bottom left corner lies a newspaper, the headline of which reads ‘1000 killed in air raid’. The piece therefore has an even darker undertone, as the sailors now take on an even more vulnerable dimension – perhaps it is their friends, colleagues, families, who have been killed in this air raid. Indeed, the final sailor sits alone on a bench, blended almost entirely into the background, his head drooped; he is isolated and alone. This social commentary makes Cadmus’ paintings as even more impressive than they already are, as everything about his satire is entirely deliberate. Cadmus has stated that, ‘a generalized satirical concept, seems to me, to be less significant as art and much less effective as propaganda for correcting evils.’ [5] By making his satire extremely deliberate and focused on a critique of hegemonic masculinity, Cadmus avoids a generalised concept of critiquing hegemonic masculinity broadly and instead focuses on how damaging hegemonic masculinity is to sailors. In forcing them to present as overtly confident, suave and carefree many may have been repressing their queer identities while watching their friends die in combat. By emphasising the problematic nature of the ‘façade masking the fear,’ [6] Cadmus depicts the men in Sailors and Floosies as young men seeking affirmations of their supposed virility and overt sexuality from prostitutes, who, in the end, only reduce them to childlike versions of themselves, desperate for connection and validation. Thus, they are not only emasculated, but also infantilised.
Cadmus’ vulnerable presentation of young sailors drastically opposes the ways in which contemporary sailors were being presented by the Navy. During the interwar period the U.S. Navy and Army were attempting to grow their base, which relied on appealing to the American privileged classes, and the campaign required the sailor to be presented as virtuous.[7] However, the U.S. navy perceived The Fleet’s In! to be, ‘a gratuitously satirical image aimed at criticizing the morality of sailors on shore leave and feared the influence it could have on Washington.’ [8] As such, it was removed from The Corcoran Gallery of Art before the exhibition it was meant to be displayed in was opened. Ironically, this attempted censorship only launched Cadmus and his works into the media spotlight, propelling him from relative obscurity to the subject of intense scrutiny. [9] Art Historian Bryan Martin points out that, ‘in trying to suppress the image, it proliferated society in a much wider sense due to the media that surrounded its controversy’ and provoked ‘a national scandal’. [10] Even more scandalously, both Sailors and Floosies and The Fleet’s In! are likely set in Riverside Park, close to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, which were popular areas for cruising - particularly for young queer men - in the 1920s and 30s. [11] The implicit setting of the paintings, under a particularly phallic monument, reveals the lengths and depths to which Cadmus was able to satirise hegemonic sailor masculinity, and it is thus entirely unsurprising that the Navy attempted to suppress his art.
Stoughton & Stoughton Architects, The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Monument, 1902.
Riverside Park. Photo: Myfanwy Greene.
The ‘Husky’ man[14] versus the Cupid: Representations of the Male Body
Cadmus also examines subversive masculinities through his presentation of the male body. At the time Cadmus was painting, in the 1930s, the masculine body was being rapidly redefined, largely as a result of the Great Depression. Josep Armengol has pointed out that, ‘American culture during the Depression became increasingly obsessed with muscular, rather than success-oriented, manifestations of masculinity’.[15] Additionally, Conor Heffernan has outlined in his essay ‘Building Husky Men: Strenuous Masculinity in Post-Depression America’, the phenomenon that, ‘for a subset of relatively affluent, young and white American men, muscular physiques, built through strenuous physical activity, became a signifier of their masculine virility, strength and discipline.’ [16] Both of these scholars point out the ways in which the masculine body was undergoing a significant cultural redefinition, which Cadmus certainly understood. Cadmus’ bodies play with these ideas of muscular masculinity, although, again, he satirises them heavily. In The Fleet’s In! Cadmus’ sailors are depicted with tight buttocks, emphasised bulges and thick hands, and the focus on these body parts gives the painting a homoerotic undertone. (Notice the closeness between the two sailors on the right of The Fleet’s In! and the intimacy of the buttocks of the sailor in white and the crotch of the sailor in blue). Cadmus’ sailors are certainly placed in queer positions, even while they interact crudely with the women opposite. Armengol suggests that, ‘Cadmus’ painting reveals that Depression America seemed incapable of separating masculinity from heterosexuality, gender from sexual orientation, excluding homosexual desire from the very definition of Americanness.’ [17] No wonder then, that Cadmus was so heavily criticised for his works, as his satire revealed issues in the very fabric of American society, critiquing its inability to accept homosexuality and homoeroticism during the 1930s.
Although popular society and the Navy viewed Cadmus’ work as highly defamatory and subversive, Cadmus has suggested that his work was not meant to be cynical or pessimistic, but rather, realistic and observational. Cadmus argued,
‘The actual contact with human being who are living and dying, working and playing, exercising all their functions and passions, demonstrating the heights and depths of man’s nature, gives results of far greater significance than those gained by isolation, introspection or subjective contemplation of inanimate objects. Entering the world of human beings plunges one immediately into a mixture of emotions, thoughts and action, some pleasant, some disturbing; but whether uplifting or disgusting, these reactions spring from a vital source.’ [18]
Cadmus’ depictions of the ‘husky’ body in The Fleet’s In! contrast with his representations of the vulnerable body in Sailors and Floosies. The blond sailor at the front and center of Sailors and Floosies is a character who I have termed the cupid. He seems asleep, potentially from drink, a mostly empty bottle of alcohol to his right. His curls are perfectly in place, one hand rests above his head, and the other rests gently over his crotch (quite literally protecting his ‘masculinity’). Face flushed, he is the image of traditional beauty, and he appears virginal, an unorthodox way to present a young man. Indeed, Cadmus has taken inspiration from Renaissance art in his positioning of the cupid. The Whitney Museum revealed that cupid ‘is modeled on the well-known Renaissance posture of the sleeping faun… his idealized classical beauty is juxtaposed with the vulgar, harpy-like ‘floosie’ who hovers over him.’ [19] (See the Barberini Faun [20]). Unlike the ‘husky’ men of the period, cupid represents the frailty and vulnerability of the male body, a particularly agitational presentation for an era where ‘muscles made the man’. [21] This perversion of traditional presentations of the male body, with Cadmus positioning cupid as the virginal figure who is being preyed upon, emphasises ‘the plurality, complexity and contradictions surrounding the representation of male bodies in 1930s American culture.’ [22]
Giuseppe Giorgetti, (copy of) The Barberini Faun, 2nd Century BC. Marble. Glyptothek: Munich. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The Voyeuristic Gaze
Aside from the gays, the use of the gaze in Cadmus is equally, if not more, important to the subversiveness of his masculinities. In both paintings, the audience is positioned as the voyeur, watching these controversial scenes with judgemental eyes. I have termed this experience of Cadmus’ paintings the ‘delight-disgust paradox’, as these are the two strongest feelings that the viewer is likely to feel when first experiencing Cadmus. In his paintings, Cadmus forces his viewer into complicity with these low-life, sex-driven scenes. We therefore validate his depictions of queerness and subversive masculinity - it is our eyes that legitimise their behaviour. Once the viewer realises how untoward the scenes are, it is too late, as we have already revelled hedonistically in the scene for several moments.
Anthony Morris suggests that, ‘the painting seems to uphold the expectations of modern satire, in which the viewer is asked to condemn the subject. The onlookers keep a safe distance from the performers and view them as “other”, reinforcing the distinctions between the marginalized and dominant cultures’.[23] While Morris’ point has some validity, the viewer is anything but ‘a safe distance’ from Cadmus’ characters. Rather, in our failure to condemn the actions of his characters fast enough (due to our subtle delight at their crudeness) we become entirely complicit in their behaviour. Thus, the viewer is equally as corrupt as Cadmus’ characters.
The claustrophobic nature of both paintings (particularly The Fleet’s In!) places the viewer in an uncomfortably intimate relationship with the characters – we are unable to escape these subversive and grotesque characters. Thus, the viewer’s claustrophobia proves the gaze to be important as it evokes a visceral reaction in the audience. I would go as far to suggest that this claustrophobia symbolises the restrictiveness of hegemonic masculinities. As the viewer experiences a sense of entrapment as they view the paintings, they simultaneously experience the repressive nature of hegemonic masculinity.
Conclusion
Paul Cadmus did with his paintings what few were brave enough to do in the 1930s. Using delightfully acerbic satire in his representations of the male body, homoeroticism, queerness and the voyeuristic gaze, he revealed the damaging nature of hegemonic masculinity. Samuel Walburn has argued that Cadmus’ art ‘so masterfully maneuvered the liminal space between private and public, painting subversive images immersed in covert queerness… using queer art as a tool of political commentary’. [24] Indeed, we have Cadmus to thank for his bravery in painting these works, as he has provided both art historians and gender theorists with a wealth of early representations of American military queerness. Cadmus’ paintings are still extremely relevant and important to queer representation, and his satire remains poignant and useful in current examinations of queerness and masculinity.
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Citations:
[1] Admiral Hugh Rodman quoted in Anthony J. Morris, ‘Paul Cadmus and Carnival, 1934: Representing the Comic Grotesque’, American Art 26, no. 3 (2012): 92.
[2] Beth Genné, ‘“Freedom Incarnate”: Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the Dancing Sailor as an Icon of American Values in World War’, Dance Chronicle 24, no. 1 (2001): 90.
[3] Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Brattleboro, Vermont: Echo Point Books & Media, 2018).
[4] Josep M. Armengol, ‘Gendering the Great Depression: Rethinking the Male Body in 1930s American Culture and Literature’, Journal of Gender Studies 23, no. 1 (2013): 60.
[5] Philip Eliasoph and Paul Cadmus, Paul Cadmus: Yesterday & Today (Steve Parish, 1981).
[6] Genné, “Freedom Incarnate,” 93.
[7] Morris, “Paul Cadmus and Carnival,” 94.
[8] Morris, “Paul Cadmus and Carnival,” 94.
[9] Bryan Martin, ‘Paul Cadmus and the Censorship of Queer Art - the Metropolitan Museum of Art’, Metmuseum.org, 25 June 2021.
[10] Martin, “Paul Cadmus and the Censorship of Queer Art.”
[11] Martin, “Paul Cadmus and the Censorship of Queer Art”.
[12] Gene Kelly quoted in Genné, ‘“Freedom Incarnate”: Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the Dancing Sailor as an Icon of American Values in World War,’ 89.
[13] Genné, ‘“Freedom Incarnate”: Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the Dancing Sailor as an Icon of American Values in World War,’ 89.
[14] Conor Heffernan, ‘Building Husky Men: Strenuous Masculinity in Post-Depression America’, European Journal of American Culture 40, no. 2 (2021): 105–20.
[15] Armengol, ‘Gendering the Great Depression: Rethinking the Male Body in 1930s American Culture and Literature’, 6.
[16] Heffernan, ‘Building Husky Men: Strenuous Masculinity in Post-Depression America’, 4.
[17] Armengol, ‘Gendering the Great Depression: Rethinking the Male Body in 1930s American Culture and Literature’, 65 (emphasis mine).
[18] Eliasoph and Cadmus, Paul Cadmus: Yesterday & Today (Steve Parish, 1981).
[19] Sailors and Floosies caption, 1938, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art.
[20] Sailors and Floosies caption, 1938, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art.
[21] Heffernan, “Building Husky Men,” 22.
[22] Armengol, ‘Gendering the Great Depression: Rethinking the Male Body in 1930s American Culture and Literature’, 64
[23] Morris, ‘Paul Cadmus and Carnival, 1934: Representing the Comic Grotesque’, 96.
[24] Samuel W D Walburn, ‘“A Most Disgraceful, Sordid, Disreputable, Drunken Brawl”: Paul Cadmus and the Politics of Queerness in the Early Twentieth Century’, The Purdue Historian 8, no. 1 (2017): 11.
