Writing the fairy Huckleberry Finn: William Goyen's and Truman Capote's genderings of male homosexuality.

After rehearsing persisting representations of same-sex desire in the Southern Renaissance's literary production, this essay charts how novels by Truman Capote and William Goyen reveal contradictory genderings of male homosexuality. Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms collapses male gay identity with effeminacy, while Goyen's The House of Breath replicates this model but also contrasts it with a coexisting and competing one in which masculine men can physically act upon gay desire. Thus, contrary to the theorizations of Michel Foucault and David Halperin, these representations suggest the absence of a unified model of mid-twentieth-century male homosexuality.