Homophobia In Charles Beaufort's The Crooked Man

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Charles Beaufort's “The Crooked Man” is a short story that gives an inverted perspective of homophobia at the time it was written. The piece was published in the August 1955 edition of Playboy Magazine, after initially being rejected by Esquire, and received much outcry from it's readers. In Beaufort's story, the narrator attends an all-male bar in a society where heterosexuality is universally unaccepted. The men surrounding him make passes at him, to which he toys with and then ultimately declines, as he is waiting for Mina, his female partner. As he waits, it becomes evident how uneasy he is and how he longs for normalcy; although he rejects the first moves from other men, particularly the “finger dance”, he enjoys the idea of perhaps having …show more content…

In 1950, five years before the story was published, there was great speculation of a “homosexual underground” within political and government agencies, referred to as the “Lavender Scare”. Queer individuals were forced to hide their private lives, in fear that there would be tangible consequences. In 1953, President Eisenhower signed the Executive Order 10450, within which “sexual perversion” is established as grounds for the investigation and dismissal of federal employees. One year later, the Army-McCarthy hearings brought into question the “supposed security risks” posed by homosexuals employed by the federal government. During the trial, Joseph Welch, Special Counsel for the U.S army, publicly defined the terms “fairy” and “pixie”, then proceeded to mock homosexuality of the time. Playboy's inclusion of Beaufort's piece was undeniably controversial, and upon receiving much negative feedback, Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, commented that “if it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society, then the reverse was wrong,

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