BY ERNIE MCLEOD

but I suspect Carson
McCullers used the word
“queer” more than any other
fiction writer. In The Member
of the Wedding alone every-
thing from a conversation to
feelings to the kitchen wall to
the night outside is described
as queer. Of course “queer”
connoted something different
in 1946 — when The Member
of the Wedding was published
— than it does today, but
McCullers’s reliance on it is
telling. In her fictional world
nearly everything, including
romantic love, is at odds with
mainstream norms. Because
her characters are almost
exclusively social outcasts,
their pairings — even the
“straight” ones — all seem
essentially queer.

Though McCullers’s
work, with its eye towards the
grotesque, is often labeled
“Southem Gothic,” the magic
lies in its depiction of the
ordinary. Details that should
seem perfectly normal appear
fuh-house-mirror warped,
while the peculiar comes
across as everyday. A passage
from The Member of the
Wedding could describe
McCullers’s writing itself: “a
curious fact about this day
was a twisted sense of the
astonishing; the unexpected
did not make her wonder, and
only the long known, the
familiar, struck her with a
strange surprise.”

Since her death at age
fifty in 1967, Carson.
McCullers has never disap-
peared from the canon, queer
or otherwise. Four of "her five
novels have been turned into
movies. The Member of the
, Wedding, in addition to
achieving Broadway success,
has been filmed twice — in
1952 with Julie Harris, and for
TV in 1997. Reflections in a
_ _ Golden Eye, McCullers’s most

I. "overtly weird and homoerotic
novel, was equally bent in its
1967 mm adaptation. (Ai
' super-sultry Liz", a way-

_ repressed Marlon, an ultra-'

can’t offer scientific proof, I

. queeny.Filipinoflhouseboy, and:

a hunky nude horseba ‘k—rid—
ing soldier — rent it tonight!)

In the past year, how-
ever, McCullers’s life and
works have undergone reex-
amination: an article on her by
gay writer Hilton Als appeared
in a December New Yorker; a
new biography by Josyane
Savigneau has been translated
from French into English; and
lesbian writer Sarah
Schulman’s play Carson
McCullers (Historically
Inaccurate) ran this winter in
New York.

While McCullers was
twice married to the same man
(Reeves McCullers, a failed
writer"and hopeless alcoholic
who eventually committed
suicide), it’s no secret she had
lesbian leanings. She pursued
several well—known, unattain-
able women — including Greta
Garbo — but her actual sexual
experiences with women
were, at most, limited. At the
prestigious artists’ community
Yaddo, she became infatuated
with writer Katherine Anne
Porter, going so far as to
throw herself across Porters
threshold, repeatedly profess-
ing her love. Porter wasn’t
impressed.

Schulman argues that
McCullers was really a trans-
gendered person, which makes
sense when you look at her
fiction. Her most autobio-
graphical characters — includ-
ing Frankie in The Member of
the Wedding and Mick in The

Heart is a Lonely Hunter — are

tomboyish girls with boys’
names. Miss Amelia in The
Ballad of the Sad Cafe is
described as a “dark, tall
woman with bones and mus-
cles like a man.” McCullers
herself was quoted as saying
that she was born a man.

In spite of her early
success (a story published at
nineteen, The Heart is a
Lonely Hunter at twenty-
three), McCullers’s life was
not an easy one.

Undiagnosed rheumat-
ic fever when she was a A

, teenager led to a series of

increasingly paralyzing

I strokesfwhen she was in her

tw',enties,. Fromiiher early thir-

‘ ties onward she was basically