In October 1960, James Baldwin and John Cheever spoke on a panel together 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’.
Strange Relations 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, Ralf 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, the damaging expectations of contemporary gender and sexuality.
With a curious, intelligent and sensitive gaze, Ralf Webb sheds new light on each writer. Together, these artists offer a powerful and moving argument for a transformative new masculinity, grounded in fluidity, love and intimacy.
Ralf Webb is the author of Rotten Days in Late Summer, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in Fantastic Man, Granta, Guardian and the London Review of Books. He tutors in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Strange Relations is his first nonfiction book.